When you chew gum, you probably can't imagine how many twists there were in the story of its invention. So in honor of the 154th anniversary of the filing of a patent application for the gum in the US, we used Forefront to bring you some details about the stickiest battle in history.
On December 28, 1869, William Semple of Mount Vernon in central Ohio filed a patent application for what he described as "a combination of rubber with other items, in any proportion adapted to the formation of acceptable gum." So far so good—until you hear what Semple's profession was: dentist. His goal, despite the conspiracy theories that now come to mind, was not to create a queue of patients for himself, but quite the opposite: his gum was designed to clean his teeth, so that people would have to reach him less, and even then he would have less work.
A significant plot twist is that Semple's application was denied. That's because Amos Tyler, who lived in the same state — in the city of Toledo on Ohio's northern tip — had already filed for a patent on the gum nearly six months earlier, on July 27. But even he doesn't get the historical credit as the inventor of the gum—because as early as 1848, 21 years earlier, John Curtis of Maine had sold a product he called "pure Maine spruce rubber." Unfortunately, he did not think to patent the product.
But even if Curtis had patented the gum before Tyler, he couldn't have been called the inventor of the gum. This is because gum-like substances were chewed in different cultures around the world for centuries earlier. Indigenous peoples of North and Central America routinely chewed resins from trees such as fir (hence Curtis's "spruce gum") and resin from the spudilla tree, which were the natural version of gum.
Despite all the twists, Semple's patent application is considered an important milestone in the history of chewing gum. The gum in its version as we know it today arrived only 100 years later, in the 70s (i.e. 20-50 years ago), first in fruit flavors and then in slightly less traditional flavors.
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