Chewing Gum & Cigarettes

 


Chewing Gum and Cigarettes

                                 Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna

     I came across the astounding fact that General Santa Anna--he of Texas War of Independence and Mexican War fame--introduced chewing gum to the United States!! 

    Santa Anna was president/dictator/caudillo of Mexico five times. Between 1823 and 1855 every time he took power, he managed to anger enough people he would be overthrown. Even though he constantly lost battles, he was known as a better general than politician or administrator.  

Liberal and Conservative Mexicans joined together to create a new constitution, one which they hoped would stop the chaos of Mexican politics. Known as the War of the Reforma they triumphed in August of 1855. Santa Anna was driven into exile. 

He lived in various places, Cuba, Columbia, St. Thomas, and New York City. 

With him, Santa Anna took several tons of gummy sap from the sapodilla tree (Manilkara zapota), an evergreen growing in southern Mexico into Colombia. In New York City, Santa Anna hired a scientist and inventor named Thomas Adams to turn this rubbery substance into a form that could be sold to buggy makers to coat wagon or carriage wheels. 

Sapodilla tree

Adams noticed, Santa Anna constantly chewed a bit of chicle, the rubbery substance he was trying to sell to carriage makers. Adams believed Santa Anna was onto something and bought a ton of it to experiment on his own. He never could develop a formula saleable to carriage makers.   

Meanwhile, Santa Anna was off to some other place to live where he could attempt raising money and recruits to return to Mexico. At various times he lived in Cuba, St Thomas, Columbia as well as New York.

Adams still had nearly a ton of gum.  What to do?  

He cut it into little pieces, mixed in more sugar, and marketed as New York Chewing Gum.  It was nowhere near as toxic, messy or addictive as chewing tobacco. 

Adams finally got around to patenting a chewing gum making machine in 1888 and soon after that, chewing gum was the first item ever sold in the new-fangled vending machines. 

1 cent for your gumball!

Putting a coating of hard sugar around it, somebody else marketed it as "Chiclets."  

   Santa Anna's first wife openly smoked cigarettes (from her gold and diamond "cigar case") after supper while gentlemen smoked cigars. The Scottish born, American raised wife of the Ambassador of Spain to Mexico records the incident in her book Life in Mexico in 1829.

Now, you are really armed to charm with sparkling conversation at the next dinner party!



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Balloons and Perfect Horse Wonder

Image
  Balloons And "Perfect Horse Wonder"     From the late 1840s through the 1850s,  ballooning was taking off (pardon the pun.) Attempts were being made to make aerial journeys from St. Louis to New York City; San Francisco to New York City and an ambitious plan to make a trans-Atlantic balloon flight. The FAA Would Not Have Approved the "City of New York" (And you thought the Boeing 737 was unsafe!?) And then, there was the absurd.  Imagine somebody attempting the following today Balloon Ascension on Horseback Professor Elliot made a balloon ascension on horseback at St. Louis, Mo., on Monday of last week. The Republican  says: Agreeable to announcement: Professor Elliot made his aerial voyage on horseback. The ground inside the enclosure was thronged with ladies and gentlemen to witness his perilous voyage, while outside the numbers could only be enumerated by  thousands. There were many who thought the horse would not go up but true to the appointed t...
Read more

1858-America's War With Paraguay

Image
The US War With Paraguay--1858 Map of the area in 1864 Yes.  The United States almost went to war with Paraguay in 1858. Yeah. That Paraguay. The landlocked country in the middle of South America, then about the size of Texas. Congress authorized President Buchanan “to restore American honor by any means including force if necessary,” (similar to the Congressional authorization President Lyndon Johnson received to launch the Vietnam War.) It was a serious operation which sent one fourth of the US Navy (19 ships) and 2,500 troops to Buenos Aires to await orders to sail 1,300 miles up the Paraná River for which they had few charts, past well-armed forts, to invade a country for which they had no maps nor any idea of the size of enemy forces. And the President/dictator of Paraguay, Carlos Antonio Lopez, originally thought he was signing a treaty of goodwill and trade between the two countries.  President Carlos Antonio Lopez If it had not been for cool heads of an American navy ...
Read more

Amalgamationist & Abolitionists

Image
  Amalgamationist & Abolitionists "Amalgamation"--the code word for sexual relations between the races--was feared.  "Amalgamationists vs Abolitionists"      Anybody liberal enough to publicly espouse the view that Blacks were human and deserved the same legal rights as Whites was labeled "an Amalgamationist." Further, it implied legal inter racial marriages.   It was possible--quite common, in fact--to be an abolitionist and not  an amalgamationist.        Abolitionists were considered a Northern fringe group of eccentrics demanding the impossible.  Abolitionists existed before the founding of the republic, but the movement stirred the South's ire starting in the 1830s.      In modern terms they were a bit like PETA (People for Ethical Treatment of Animals.) For example, most people do not think animals should be treated with mindless cruelty--that does not mean most people think chickens should h...
Read more