This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer. Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S. and can become harder to treat if left undetected.
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Validu 82526, participating stores, while supplies last, toppies and sauces sold separately. Copyright 7-Eleven Hank, all rights reserved. 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, bubble gum, 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 flavored, obnoxiously pink candy gum, is the favorite treat of Violet Beauregard.
Now, this little number I hear is pouring words. Thank you, sir. Violet, would you care to say a few words to the relation? I chew it all day except at mealtimes when I stick it behind my ear. Violet?
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.
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 Fleir. 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. Dimer 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. Dimer's goal was always to create a kind of gum you could blow bubbles with.
So while it's nice to think that Dimer 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 bubblegum just right, coming remarkably close to doing so on several occasions, only for the results not to repeat when mixed again. Yeah. 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 bubblegum, 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, Dina 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 Shemek 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 of 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 flavor 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 vein as products like Coca-Cola and Pepsi. That said, the original ingredients list included sugar dextrose corn syrup, gumbase high-fructose corn syrup, artificial flavor, colour, cornstarch, and BHT. Digging a little deeper, we have a rough idea of the base flavor 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 flavour 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 supposed to taste like Is, well, bubble gun. 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 want to 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. Spending time outdoors, then let's talk about skin cancer.
Non-melanoma skin cancers, or NMSCs, including basal cell carcinoma and cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma, are the most common cancers in the U.S. and can become harder to treat if left undetected. That's why sun protection and timely detection matter. Our sponsor, Regeneron, is raising awareness about advanced NMSCs. Learn more and take the pledge to see a dermatologist annually at Let's Get RealaboutskinCancer.com.
IceCube's big three season is heating up. The most competitive basketball league on earth is on CBS this Sunday. The two best teams go head to head as Coach Nancy Lieberman and Greg Monroe's Dallas Power take on the one-seed Chicago Triplets, led by Coach Dr. J and Captain Mondres Harold. Then Coach Gary Payton and the Boston Ballhawks battle Nasir Corps and the Detroit Amps in a must-win game for Boston.
The game played the way you love. Watch live Sunday, August 9th on CBS at 1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m. Pacific, and catch replays Monday on BET. Presented by iHeart.
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Keeping a working forest growing takes a massive commitment. That's why working forest professionals plant over 1 billion seedlings annually in the U.S., ensuring more trees are planted than harvested. But it takes more than planting to sustain these ecosystems. It means caring for everything in the forest, from clean water to thriving wildlife. Because when we take care of our forests, they'll thrive for generations.
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