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CHEWING GUM
Next time someone complains about your gum chewing, say you’re exercising your jaw. That’s why chewing gum was invented when it was patented by an Ohio dentist, William Semple, in 1869. Semple’s chewing gum never caught on as a jaw exerciser. Instead people preferred to chew the gum from the spruce tree because it was so flavourful. Unfortunately, this “spruce gum” became scarce because newspapers grew and ate up all the trees for paper.
At about the same time as the Ohio dentist patented his jaw-exercising gum, Thomas Adams learned about a new kind of rubber called chicle. Chicle is the rubbery sap of the sapodilla tree, which grows in parts of Central America. Adams believed that chicle could be an amazing new material if he could only find a way to vulcanise it the way Charles Goodyear had vulcanised rubber. But no matter what Adams did, chicle wouldn’t stretch or bounce or do anything useful. Adams did however notice that the Mexicans of Central America enjoyed chewing small lumps of the solidified sap.
One day while in a pharmacy, Adams overheard a young girl asking for some chewing gum. He remembered the Mexicans chewing chicle and persuaded the storeowner to try selling chicle formed into balls. Gum-chewing kids loved it and it solved the problem of the spruce gum shortage. In 1871 Adams invented a machine that rolled the chicle gum into sticks. He added flavour into it too. Before long all of America was chewing this chicle gum that was, Adams claimed, “health-giving, circulation-building, teeth-preserving, digestion-aiding, brain-refreshing, chest-developing, nerve-settling and soul-tuning”.
New gum inventions were soon on the way. Small chunks of gum were coated with candy and called little chicles, or Chiclets. When you bit into one, the candy coating squished into the flavourless gum inside. Nowadays you even have sugar-free gum for people who suffer from diabetes or who are on a diet.
Extra strong gum that could be blown into bubbles followed - Bubble Gum. By the 1950’s people around the world were chewing gum. In Japan, for example, people chewed gum flavoured to resemble green tea and pickled plums. Gum was even chewed by astronauts in space. The first gum chewing in space took place on the American Gemini 5 mission in 1965. That is the official story. Some people believe that gum was smuggled aboard earlier space flights. How did the astronauts get rid of the gum before returning to Earth? They did what thousands of school kids have done over the years when caught with gum: they swallowed it!
(With acknowledgement to ‘ Inventions’ by Valerie Wyatt)
So now you know!Ask your parents and grandparents about Chiclets chewing gum.
Use the article about Chewing Gum or your dictionary to be sure you know the meanings of the following words.
HOW WELL DID YOU UNDERSTAND?
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