This is an iHeart Podcast. Tired of spills and stains on your sofa? WashableSofas.com has your back, featuring the Anibay Collection, the only designer sofa that's machine washable inside and out, where designer quality meets budget-friendly prices. That's right, sofas started just $699. Enjoy a no-risk experience with pet-friendly, stain-resistant, and changeable slip covers made with performance fabrics.
Experience cloud-like comfort with high-resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing. The sturdy steel frame ensures longevity, and the modular pieces can be rearranged anytime. Check out washable sofas.com and get up to 60% off your Anibay sofa, backed by a 30-day satisfaction guarantee. If you're not absolutely in love, send it back for a full refund. No return shipping or restocking fees, every penny back.
Upgrade now at washable sofas.com. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. Good morning, welcome to Today. From back to school to tackling your to-do list, the Today Show is your best start to the day. It's a new season and every morning, we're here to help you take it all on.
as the forecast called for football all across the country. Blockbuster stars, live concerts, and so much more. Wake up to where it's all happening. We're getting back to all of it, and the best way to start is together. Watch The Today Show, weekday mornings at 7 a.m.
on NBC. This is Danielle Fischel from Pod Meets World. Parents, quick question. When is the last time you won snack time? The other day, I handed my son a perfectly portioned Pinterest-level snack and And he traded it for a Mott's applesauce pouch.
I'm not mad, just impressed. And that's why Mott's no-sugar-added applesauce pouches are perfect to keep on hand. They're made with real apples, packed in a super easy pouch, perfect for tossing in a lunchbox, keeping in the car, or grabbing as you're running out the door. Plus, they're a good source of vitamin C, and kids love them. Win-win!
Make sure your kid wins snack time with Motts. Real apples make real good applesauce. Learn more at Motts.com. Builders trust Ferguson Home to bring innovation and efficiency to every project. With top products, expert support, and tools that allow you to browse, organize, order, and work with clients, Ferguson Home has custom solutions for every pro.
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Shop top brands like Kohler or find your local showroom at fergusonhome.com. If you eat too many ultra-processed foods, you could be starving your gut microbes, and they'll get hangry. That's one of many things I learned after working on a new audio course about the gut microbiome. You can learn how to keep your gut happy by listening to Try This from the Washington Post. I'm Christina Quinn, I host Try This.
Dig in with me on practical advice for life's common challenges. Try this right now wherever you're listening. Seriously, try it. This is Leigh Habib and this is our American Stories. Chewing gum has been around for centuries.
From the ancient Greeks to the American Indians, everyone's chewed it. But the best kind of gum, bubblegum, wasn't invented until 1928. Here to tell the story is Simon Whistler from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel and its sister. The Brain Food Show podcast. Let's take a listen.
Bubblegum, the ambiguously flavoured obnoxiously pink candy gum, is the favourite treat of Violet Beauregard.
Now this little number right here is a four horse. Thank you, sir. Violet, would you care to say a few words of tipulation? Here it is. Golden ticket number three.
And it's all nice.
Well, I'm a gum chewer normally, but when I heard about these ticket things of Wonkas, I laid off the gum and switched to candy bars instead.
Now, of course, I'm right back on gum. I chew it all day except at mealtimes when I stick it beyond my ear. Violet. Pull it, Mother.
Now this piece of gum here is one that I've been chewing on for three months solid, and that's a world record. It's beaten the record held by my best friend, Miss Cornelia Prince Metal, and was she mad? Hi Cornelia, how are you, sweetie? Let me just button here for a moment to say that you. First the story of how bubblegum became a thing at all.
In 1928, Walter Dimer was working as an accountant for the now-defunct Candian baseball card manufacturer Flear. At this time, Fleir was struggling financially when then-president of the company, Gilbert Mustin, hit upon the idea of creating his own gum base to improve profit margins. At the time, they bought their gum product from another manufacturer before repackaging it and selling it. Towards this end, Mustin began tinkering with recipes, but was frequently called away from his work to answer the building's only phone, which was on the first floor, while his office and the mixers were on the third. Accordingly, whenever Mustin was called away, Dimer, who worked in an office next door, was called upon to watch over the latest gum batch or lend a hand when necessary.
Over time, Mustin began to trust the 23-year-old accountant to such an extent that he was allowed to experiment on his own time, a perk Daimer took frequent advantage of, often spending many hours after a shift mixing random flavours together and tinkering with the Fleur gumbase recipe in order to improve it. Daimer claims he stumbled across the formula for bubblegum partially by accident after about a year of tinkering. In his own words, it was an accident. I was doing something else and ended up with something with bubbles. That said, as with many of these supposed accidents, this isn't quite correct.
Daimer's goal was always to create a kind of gum you could blow bubbles with.
So, while it's nice to think that Daimer accidentally mixed a bunch of chemicals together and stumbled across a lotto ticket recipe, the reality is that he spent many hundreds of hours meticulously mixing batches of gum together in the hopes of getting the formula for bubble gum just right, coming remarkably close to doing so on several occasions, only for the results not to repeat when mixed again. Dyner's inspiration for bubblegum was an earlier, never-released prototype product created by Fleer's founder, Frank H. Fleer. This was created in 1906 and it was called Blibber Blubber. Like bubble gum, blibber blubber could be used to blow bubbles.
However, the gum would stick to teeth, lips and cheeks. It was much too wet and had poor elasticity. This resulted in any bubbles you've managed to blow popping quickly, splattering saliva everywhere, and then adhering tightly to your face and lips. While Daimer's exact recipe isn't publicly known, he claimed that he was able to fix the former problem by adding some unspecified amount of latex, resulting in a more elastic and less sticky gum. That said, this wasn't the only tweak needed, as in his earliest near-hits at inventing bubblegum, the resulting gum worked perfectly at first, but had an extremely short shelf life due to an issue with hardening up within a matter of hours after being made.
It was this problem that was eventually accidentally fixed by Daimer, though he never publicly mentioned how he fixed it, nor why the solution was supposedly accidentally stumbled upon. Today, wax is typically added to gum to keep it soft at room temperature, and some form of powder like cornstarch is used to keep it from becoming too sticky. Whatever the case, after inventing bubblegum, Diner scaled up the recipe and created 300 pounds of it. This brings us to why bubblegum is nearly always pink. According to Dimer, when the time came to add food colouring to his first proper batch of bubblegum, the only colouring the company had on hand was pink, which just so happened to be his favourite colour.
And if that made you go, hmm, well around this time pink was actually considered a masculine colour and blue was a favourite feminine colour. With no other choice available to him, Dimer poured an entire bottle of pink food colouring into the mixer, giving the candy its now iconic, obnoxiously loud colouration. Over the years, as more companies attempted to create competing products, they similarly colored it pink, leading to it becoming the go-to colour for bubblegum. Ultimately, Fleir settled on the name Double Bubble for the product, deciding to individually package the candy in a manner not too dissimilar to how pieces of taffy are traditionally sold, and then sent 100 sample pieces to a small store located at 26 Schemek Taddy Street, Philadelphia. The store sold out within a day, prompting Fleir to make several more tons of the bubblegum and begin widely marketing it.
In the first year of bubblegum sales alone, Fleir sold $1.5 million worth of the gum, which is about $21 million today, literally saving the company, though Dimer himself never received a dime extra for his non-accounting invention.
However, in recognition of his integral role in the creation of the product that saved the company, Flair promptly fired Daimer from his role as company accountant and made him an executive of sales. His job then included training salesmen on how to blow bubbles so they could demonstrate the product to potential customers. Originally priced at just a penny, Bubblegum proved to be immensely popular with Depression-era customers. And as a result, Dimer's job, which he formerly was close to losing due to the company being close to going under, proved to be both secure and rather lucrative during one of the most financially taxing times in American history. While he received no royalties from the product, as the years passed, Dimer was paid to travel the globe, promoting Double Bubble, eventually being promoted to senior vice president and serving on the company's board of directors.
He continued to hold the latter board seat for some 15 years after he retired in 1970. Even after retiring, Dimer's love for bubblegum never subsided, and he could frequently be found literally riding an adult-sized tricycle around his retirement village in Pennsylvania, throwing handfuls of free bubblegum, of which he was given a lifetime supply by FLIA, to local children. He also reportedly occasionally invited neighborhood children over to his house for bubblegum blowing parties. According to Dimer's second wife, Florence, who he married at the age of 91, his first wife, Adelaide, died in 1990, four years after their two children both died in 1986, though at least leaving them with many grandchildren and great-grandchildren, he made it explicitly clear late in life that he didn't care about not receiving any money for his creation, something that would have made him enormously wealthy had he patented it. As the man himself noted shortly before his death at the age of 92 on January 9th, 1988, I've done something with my life.
I've made kids happy around the world.
Okay, so this brings us around to what the standard flavour of bubblegum is supposed to taste like. The original formula used by Flair was intentionally never elaborated upon and the recipe is now considered to be a trade secret in the same veins products like Coca-Cola and Pepsi. That said, the original ingredients list included sugar, dextrose, corn syrup, gum base, high fructose corn syrup, artificial flavor, colour, cornstarch, and BHT. Digging a little deeper, we have a rough idea of the base flavour ingredients based on interviews with Diner, who claims he originally used a combination of wintergreen, peppermint, vanilla, and cinnamon in unspecified quantities to come up with the flavor for the first ever batch of bubblegum. This contrasts slightly with other sources who contest that bubblegum flavor is actually created using a mixture of several natural and artificial fruit flavours, usually strawberry, pineapple, and banana, in varying quantities.
So, in the end, the flavour is an artificial construct with no analogue in nature. Given this, the answer to the question of what is bubblegum is supposed to taste like is, well, bubblega. and a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Greg Hengler. And a special thanks to Simon Whistler. from the Today I Found Out YouTube channel.
And its sister, The Brain Food Show podcast. Go to both, visit them, visit them often. And boy, what a terrific story about an inventor who was an accountant, never got royalties, didn't get the patent. but saved his company, and we're talking about Walter Dimer. And in 1928, well, he had to try and figure out some way to save his company.
And he did. And the whole notion that this happened by accident Well that's kind of debunked, because accidents happen to people who are trying to create something and spend their times in labs, hundreds of hours, mixing batches of formula to get to the outcome they wanna get. Which in this case is one of the great confectioneries in human history, Double Bubble. By the way, we've done many Food Stories, Fanny Farmer, Little Debbie, Fast Food. Piggly Wiggly, Jelly Belly, Trader Joe's, even Bucky's is kind of a food story.
The story of Bubblegum Here on Our American Stories. Tired of spills and stains on your sofa? WashableSofas.com has your back. featuring the Anibay collection, the only designer sofa that's machine washable inside and out, where designer quality meets budget-friendly prices. That's right, sofas start at just $699.
Enjoy a no-risk experience with pet-friendly, stain-resistant, and changeable slip covers made with performance fabrics. Experience cloud-like comfort with high-resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing. The sturdy steel frame ensures longevity, and the modular pieces can be rearranged anytime. Check out washable sofas.com and get up to 60% off your Anabay sofa, backed by a 30-day satisfaction guarantee. If you're not absolutely in love, send it back for a full refund.
No return shipping or restocking fees, every penny back. Upgrade now at washable sofas.com. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. Our partner, Eli Lilly and Company, just announced duets for type 2 diabetes, a campaign celebrating real patient stories of support because managing type 2 diabetes doesn't have to be a solo act. Share your story at mountjaro.com/slash duets.
Mountjaro terzepatide is an injectable prescription medicine that is used along with diet and exercise to improve blood sugar, glucose, in adults with type 2 diabetes mellitus. Mount Jaro is not for use in children. Don't take Mount Jaro if you're allergic to it or if you or someone in your family had medullary thyroid cancer or multiple endocrine neoplasia syndrome type 2. Stop and call your doctor right away if you have an allergic reaction, a lump or swelling in your neck, severe stomach pain, or vision changes. Serious side effects may include inflamed pancreas and gallbladder problems.
Taking Mount Jaro with a sulfinyl norrhea or insulin may cause low blood sugar. Tell your doctor if you're nursing pregnant plan to be or taking birth control pills and before scheduled procedures with anesthesia. Side effects include nausea, diarrhea, and vomiting, which can cause dehydration and may cause kidney problems. Once weekly Mount Jaro Is available by prescription only in 2.5, 5, 7.5, 10, 12.5, and 15 milligram per 0.5 milliliter injection. Call 1-800-LILLIERX-800-545-5979 or visit mountjaro.lilly.com for the Mountjaro indication and safety summary with warnings.
Talk to your doctor for more information about Mountjaro. Mountjaro and its delivery device base are registered trademarks owned or licensed by Eli Lilly and Company, its subsidiaries or affiliates. The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox is now streaming on Hulu and Hulu on Disney Plus. In 2007, Amanda Knox was halfway around the world studying abroad in Italy. She had no idea that her dream would turn into a nightmare.
Inspired by the actual events of her wrongful conviction and 15-year fight for freedom, watch the Hulu original series, The Twisted Tale of Amanda Knox, now streaming on Hulu, and Hulu on Disney Plus for bundle subscribers. Terms apply. If you eat too many ultra-processed foods, you could be starving your gut microbes, and they'll get hangry. That's one of many things I learned after working on a new audio course about the gut microbiome. You can learn how to keep your gut happy by listening to Try This from the Washington Post.
I'm Christina Quinn. I host Try This. Dig in with me on practical advice for life's common challenges. Follow Try This right now wherever you're listening. Seriously, try it.
Every day has a to-do list. but adding Enjoy Belveda to yours can help you knock out the rest of it. Belveda breakfast biscuits are a tasty and convenient breakfast option when paired with low-fat yogurt and fruit that provides steady energy all morning, while Belveeta Energy Snack Bites give you the perfect mid-morning refuel. Best part, they both taste great.
So make the most out of your morning with a bite of Velveeta. Pick up a pack of Belveda at your local store today. This is an iHeart podcast.
