Speaker 1: This is lavib and this is our American stories. Chewing
Speaker 1: gum has been around for centuries, from the ancient Greeks
Speaker 1: to the American Indians. Everyone's chewed it, but the best
Speaker 1: kind of gum, bubblegum, wasn't invented until nineteen twenty eight.
Speaker 1: For you to tell the story is Simon Whistler from
Speaker 1: the Today I found Out YouTube channel and its sister,
Speaker 1: the Brain Food Show podcast. Let's take a listen.
Speaker 2: Bubble gum, the ambiguously flavored, obnoxiously pink candy gum is
Speaker 2: the favorite treat of violence. Beauregart. Now this little number or.
Speaker 1: Such as or Violet, would you care to say if
Speaker 1: you works dilation here.
Speaker 3: It is gune ticket number three and it's all lost.
Speaker 2: So what happened?
Speaker 1: Violet?
Speaker 3: Whom gum? True? Normally? But when I heard about these
Speaker 3: ticket things wong as I laid off the gum and
Speaker 3: switched to candy bars instead. Now, of course I'm back
Speaker 3: on gum. I chewed all day except at meal times
Speaker 3: when I stick a pian my ear Wiler's toll it mother.
Speaker 3: And this piece of gum here is one that I've
Speaker 3: been chewing on for three months solid and that's a
Speaker 3: world record. It's beaten the record held by my best friend,
Speaker 3: Miss Cornelia Prince Metal. And was she met how counya?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Why are speaking?
Speaker 2: Let me just from moment of Susan first, the story
Speaker 2: of how bubble gum became the thing at all. In
Speaker 2: nineteen twenty eight, water Dimer was working as an accountant
Speaker 2: for the now to funct candy and baseball card manufacturer Flea.
Speaker 2: At this time, Flair was struggling financially when then presidents
Speaker 2: of the company, Gilbert Mustin, hit upon the idea of
Speaker 2: creating his own gum base to improve profit margins. At
Speaker 2: the time, they bought their gum products from another manufacturer
Speaker 2: before repackaging it and selling it. Towards this ends, must
Speaker 2: And began tinkering with recipes, but was frequently called away
Speaker 2: from his work to answer the building's only phone, which
Speaker 2: was on the first floor, while his office and the
Speaker 2: mixers rather the third. Accordingly, whenever was called away, Dimer,
Speaker 2: who worked in an office next door, was called upon
Speaker 2: to watch over the latest gunbatch or land a hand
Speaker 2: when necessary. Over time, Mustin began to trust the twenty
Speaker 2: three year old accountants to such an extent that he
Speaker 2: was allowed to experiment on his own time a perk,
Speaker 2: Dimer took frequent advantage of, often spending many hours after
Speaker 2: a shift mixing random flavors together and tinkering with the
Speaker 2: flear gum based recipe in order to improve it. Dimer
Speaker 2: claims he stumbled across the formula for bubblegum partially by accident,
Speaker 2: after about a year of tinkering. In his own words,
Speaker 2: it was an accident. I was doing something else and
Speaker 2: ended up with something with bubbles. That said, as with
Speaker 2: many of these supposed accidents, this isn't quite correct. Diamond's
Speaker 2: goal was always to create a kind of gum you
Speaker 2: could blow bubbles with. So while it's nice to think
Speaker 2: that Dimer accidentally mixed a bunch of chemicals together and
Speaker 2: stumbled across a lotto ticket recipe, the reality is that
Speaker 2: he spent many hundreds of hours meticulously mixing batches of
Speaker 2: gum together in the hopes of getting the formula for
Speaker 2: bubble I'm just right coming remarkably close to doing so
Speaker 2: on several occasions, only for the results not to repeat
Speaker 2: when mixed again. Dimer's inspiration for bubblegum was an earlier,
Speaker 2: never released prototype product created by Flear's founder, Frank H. Fleer.
Speaker 2: This was created in nineteen oh six and it was
Speaker 2: called blibber Blubber. Like bubblegum, Blibber Blubber could be used
Speaker 2: to blow bubbles. However, the gum would stick to teeth, lips,
Speaker 2: and cheeks. It was much too wet and had poor elasticity.
Speaker 2: This resulted in any bubbles you've managed to blow popping quickly,
Speaker 2: splattering saliva everywhere, and then adhering tightly to your face
Speaker 2: and lips. While Diamer's exact recipe isn't publicly known, he
Speaker 2: claimed that he was able to fix the former problem
Speaker 2: by adding some unspecified amount of latex, resulting in a
Speaker 2: more elastic and less sticky gum. That said, this wasn't
Speaker 2: the only tweak needed, as in his earliest near hits
Speaker 2: at inventing bubblegum, the resulting gum worked perfectly at first,
Speaker 2: but had an extremely short shelf life due to an
Speaker 2: issue with hard up within a matter of hours after
Speaker 2: being made. It was this problem that was eventually accidentally
Speaker 2: fixed by Diner, though he never publicly mentioned how he
Speaker 2: fixed it nor why the solution was supposedly accidentally stumbled
Speaker 2: upon him. Today, wax is typically added to gum to
Speaker 2: keep it soft at room temperature, and some form of
Speaker 2: powder like corn starches used to keep it from becoming
Speaker 2: too sticky, whatever the case. After inventing bubblegum, Dimer scaled
Speaker 2: up the recipe and created three hundred pounds of it.
Speaker 2: This brings us to why bubble gum is nearly always pink.
Speaker 2: According to Dimer, when the time came to add food
Speaker 2: colouring to his first proper batch of bubblegum, the only
Speaker 2: coloring the company had on hand was pink, which just
Speaker 2: so happened to be his favorite color. And if that
Speaker 2: made you go hmm, well, around this time, pink was
Speaker 2: actually considered a masculine color and blue was a favorite
Speaker 2: feminine color. With no other triice available to him, Dimer
Speaker 2: poured an entire bottle of pink food colouring into the mixer,
Speaker 2: giving the candy it's now iconic, obnoxiously loud colour. A
Speaker 2: Over the years, as more companies attempted to create competing products,
Speaker 2: they similarly colored it pink, leading to it becoming the
Speaker 2: go to colour for bubblegum. Ultimately, Flea settled on the
Speaker 2: name double Bubble for the product, and deciding to individually
Speaker 2: package the candy in a manner not too dissimilar to
Speaker 2: how pieces of taffy are traditionally sold, and then send
Speaker 2: one hundred sample pieces to a small store located at
Speaker 2: twenty six Chemek Taddy Street, Philadelphia. The stork sold out
Speaker 2: within a day, prompting Flear to make several more tons
Speaker 2: of the bubblegum and begin widely marketing it. In the
Speaker 2: first year of bubblegum sales alone, Fleer sold one point
Speaker 2: five million dollars worth of the gun, which is about
Speaker 2: twenty one million dollars to day, literally saving the company,
Speaker 2: though Dymer himself never received a dime extra for his
Speaker 2: non accounting invention. However, in recognition of his integral role
Speaker 2: in the creation of the product that saved the company,
Speaker 2: Flair promptly fired Dimer from his role as company accountant
Speaker 2: and made him an executive of sales. His job then
Speaker 2: included training sales on how to blow bubbles so they
Speaker 2: could demonstrate the product to potential customers. Originally priced that
Speaker 2: just a penny, bubblegum proved to be immensely popular with
Speaker 2: depression eury customers, and as a result, Diimer's job, which
Speaker 2: he formerly was close to losing due to the company
Speaker 2: being close to going under, proved to be both secure
Speaker 2: and rather lucrative during one of the most financially taxing
Speaker 2: times in American history. While he received no royalties from
Speaker 2: the product, as the years passed, Dimer was paid to
Speaker 2: travel the globe promoting Double Bubble, eventually being promoted to
Speaker 2: senior vice presidents and serving on the company's board of directors.
Speaker 2: He continued to hold the latter board seat for some
Speaker 2: fifteen years after he retired in nineteen seventy. Even after retiring,
Speaker 2: Dimer's love for bubblegum never socided, and he could frequently
Speaker 2: be found literally riding an adult sized tricycle around his
Speaker 2: retirement village in Pennsylvania, throwing handfuls of free bubblegum, of
Speaker 2: which he was given a lifetime supply by Flear, to
Speaker 2: local children. He also reportedly occasionally invited neighborhood children over
Speaker 2: to his house for bubblegum blowing parties. According to Diamer's
Speaker 2: second wife, Florence, who he married at the age of
Speaker 2: ninety one, his first wife, Adelaide, died in nineteen ninety four,
Speaker 2: years after their two children, both died in nineteen eighty six,
Speaker 2: though at least leaving them with many grandchildren and great grandchildren.
Speaker 2: He made it explicitly clear late in life that he
Speaker 2: didn't care about not receiving any money for his creation,
Speaker 2: something that would have made him enormously wealthy had he
Speaker 2: patented it. As the man himself noted shortly before his
Speaker 2: death at the age of ninety two on January the ninth,
Speaker 2: nineteen eighty eight, I've done something with my life. I've
Speaker 2: made kids happy around the world. Okay, so this brings
Speaker 2: us around to what the standard flavor of bubblegum is
Speaker 2: supposed to taste like. The original formula used by Flair
Speaker 2: was intentionally never elaborated upon, and the recipe is now
Speaker 2: considered to be a trade secret in the same vein
Speaker 2: as products like Coca cola and pepsi. That said, the
Speaker 2: original ingredients list included sugar, dextro's corn syrup, gum based
Speaker 2: high fryptose corn syrup, artificial flavor color, cornstarch, and BHT.
Speaker 2: Digging a little deeper, we have a rough idea of
Speaker 2: the base flavor ingredients based on interviews with Dimer, who
Speaker 2: claims he originally used a combination of winter green, peppermint, vanilla,
Speaker 2: and cinnamon in unspecified quantities to come up with the
Speaker 2: flavor for the first of a batch of bubblegum. This
Speaker 2: contrasts slightly with other sources who contest that bubblegum flavor
Speaker 2: is actually created using a mixture of several natural and
Speaker 2: artificial fruit flavors, usually strawberry, pineapple, and banana, in varying quantities,
Speaker 2: so in the end, the flavor is an artificial construct
Speaker 2: with no analog in nature. Given this, the answer to
Speaker 2: the question of what is bubblegum supposed to taste like?
Speaker 2: Is well?
Speaker 1: Bubblegum in a terrific job on the production, editing and
Speaker 1: storytelling by our own Greg Hangler and a special thanks
Speaker 1: to Simon Whistler from the Today I Found Out YouTube
Speaker 1: channel and its sister, the Brain Food Show podcast. Go
Speaker 1: to both, visit them, visit them often, and boy, what
Speaker 1: a terrific story about an inventor who was an accountant,
Speaker 1: never got royalties, didn't get the patent, but saved his company.
Speaker 1: And we're talking about Walter Dimer and in nineteen twenty eight, well,
Speaker 1: he had to try and figure out some way to
Speaker 1: save his company, and he did. And the whole notion
Speaker 1: that this happened by accident, well that's kind of debunked
Speaker 1: because accidents happened to people who were trying to create
Speaker 1: something and spend their times in labs, hundreds of hours
Speaker 1: mixing batches of formula to get to the outcome they
Speaker 1: want to get, which in this case is one of
Speaker 1: the great confectioneries in human history. Doubble Bubble. By the way,
Speaker 1: we've done many food stories, Fanny Farmer, Little Debbie, Fast Food,
Speaker 1: Higly Wiggly, Jelly, Belly, Trader, Joe's, even BUCkies is kind
Speaker 1: of a food story. The story of Bubblegum here on
Speaker 1: our American Stories