SP. 001 / BIRCH
Birch pitch
Dark, tar-like and practical. Chewing may have softened it before it was used to fasten stone tools.
ScandinaviaThe sticky story starts with trees
People have been chewing gum for 10,000 years.
Long before foil wrappers and peppermint sticks, people chewed tree resins. Some softened glue for tools. Others freshened the mouth. The small habit travelled from forests to factories, and eventually learned to blow a bubble.
Start at the treeFig. 01 / The bubble
Careful. It pops.
Before it came in a packet
The first gum grew on trees.
Chewing did not begin in one place. Across different cultures, people discovered that certain tree saps and resins could be worked by the teeth. The materials were local; the impulse was shared.
In Scandinavia, pieces of birch pitch still carry tooth marks from the Stone Age. In Mesoamerica, Maya communities tapped the sapodilla tree for chicle. Indigenous peoples of North America chewed spruce resin, a practice later copied by European settlers.
SP. 002 / CHICLE
Sapodilla sap
A springy natural latex with deep roots in Maya life. It later became the base of the modern gum trade.
MesoamericaSP. 003 / SPRUCE
Spruce resin
A sharp, woodsy chew used by Indigenous peoples and sold commercially in Maine in the 1800s.
North America
ARCHAEOLOGY NOTE
LOLLAND, DENMARK
One old chew held an entire human genome.
A 5,700 year old lump of birch pitch preserved the DNA of the person who chewed it. Researchers learned about her appearance, oral microbes and last meal. They nicknamed her Lola after the island of Lolland.
Read the 2019 study (opens in a new tab) ↗From sap to shelf
How gum became an industry.
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Spruce gum goes on sale
John B. Curtis of Maine makes and sells State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum. It is widely described as the first commercial chewing gum in the United States.
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Chicle meets the machine age
Thomas Adams patents a process that prepares Mexican chicle for chewing gum. His small, unflavoured pieces sell for a penny.
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A packet becomes familiar
William Wrigley Jr. introduces Juicy Fruit and Wrigley’s Spearmint. Mass advertising and nationwide distribution put gum in millions of pockets.
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The bubble holds
Walter Diemer, an accountant at the Fleer company, develops a stretchier recipe sold as Dubble Bubble. Its original batch is pink.
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Gum travels with soldiers
Chewing gum is included in U.S. military rations during the Second World War. Soldiers carry it, chew it and share it abroad.
What changed
The base changed. The habit did not.
Pick an era to examine the chewy part.
01 / BIRCH PITCH
Useful first, chewable second
Heating birch bark without oxygen creates a sticky pitch. Stone Age makers likely chewed it to soften the material for glue, though medicinal use has also been suggested.
Further chewing
Sources & notes
- Communications Biology, analysis of Mesolithic chewed pitch from Huseby Klev, Sweden.
- Nature Communications, the genome recovered from the Syltholm birch pitch.
- Smithsonian Libraries, Chicle: The Chewing Gum of the Americas.
- Library of Congress, Curtis & Son’s White Mountain chewing gum trademark.
- U.S. Patent No. 111,798, Thomas Adams’s 1871 chicle gum process.