How is chewing gum made?

Chewing gum is a sweetened, flavored confection composed primarily of latex, both natural and artificial. Organic latex, a milky white fluid produced by a variety of seed plants, is best known as the principle component of rubber. Used as a snack, gum has no nutritive value, and, when people have finished chewing, they generally throw it away rather than swallow it.

Throughout history, people in many regions have selected naturally chewy and aromatic substances as breath fresheners or thirst quenchers. The Greeks used mastic tree resin; the Italians, frankincense; the West Indians, aromatic twigs; the Arabs, beeswax. Tree resins appear to have been the most popular, and spruce sap had been a favored chewing substance for centuries in North America before New England colonists adopted it for their own enjoyment. Although spruce gum was available to anyone willing to go out into the woods and extract it from a tree, John Curtis and his son, John Bacon Curtis, thought they could package and market it. In the mid-1800s, they experimented with the first manufacture of chewing gum sticks. First they boiled the spruce gum and skimmed off impurities such as bark before adding sugar and other fillers. Then they rolled it, let it cool, and cut it into sticks which they dipped in cornstarch, wrapped in paper, and placed in small wooden boxes. The Curtis company thrived, and business grew still further when the younger Curtis developed a machine to mass produce gum and founded the first chewing gum factory. The Curtis's manufacturing process is roughly the same one used to produce chewing gum today.

Despite the Curtis's success, very few other spruce gum factories were established during the nineteenth century. However, in 1869 William F. Semple took out the first patent on chewing gum. His formula was the earliest attempt to create latex-based gum, yet he never manufactured or marketed it. However, chewing gum as we know it today was first manufactured that year by Thomas Adams. Adams began mass-producing latex-based gum after meeting with the famous Mexican general Antonio López de Santa Anna, who wanted Adams to help him introduce chicle, a rubbery tree sap from the Sapodilla trees of Mexico and Central America, as a cheap replacement for rubber. Adams could find no way of treating the chicle to render it useable, but he thought it would make an excellent chewing gum that could easily replace paraffin, the tasteless wax that dominated the chewing gum market at the time. To give his gum the proper size and consistency, Adams put the chicle in hot water until it was the consistency of putty. He then flavored it with sassafras and licorice, kneaded it, and shaped it into little balls. In 1871 Adams was the first to patent a gum-making machine. The machine kneaded the gum and ran it out in long, thin strips that could be cut off by druggists, who were the most common direct seller of chewing gum in the early days. Adams' venture proved successful, and his American Chicle Company and its gum are still around today.

The most successful chewing gum company ever is that established by William Wrigley, Jr., in 1892. Although the company, run by the founder's son and grandson after his death in 1932, developed a wide array of flavored gums, it dropped many of these to concentrate on its biggest sellers: "Juicy Fruit," "Doublemint," and "Wrigley's Spearmint." Recently, the company introduced gum for denture wearers, sugar-free gum, cinnamon-flavored gum, and non-stick bubble gum. Like earlier Wrigley products, all have proven popular. The secrets behind the success of Wrigley gums—the company has never made anything else—are strong flavor and prominent advertising. As William Wrigley, Jr., said early in the century, "Tell 'em quick and tell 'em often."

Read more: How chewing gum is made - manufacture, making, history, used, procedure, industry, machine, Raw Materials, The Manufacturing Process of chewing gum, Quality Control, The Future http://www.madehow.com/Volume-1/Chewing-Gum.html#i...

Not sure how it is made but the first form of gum was a chewy sap called mastic that kids in the times of Ancient Greece chewed it.

no idea but heres a history of that stuff.

http://inventors.about.com/od/gstartinventions/a/g...

by cows