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John Bacon Curtis | |
---|---|
Born | October 10, 1827 |
Died | June 13, 1897 (aged 69) |
Resting place | Portland, Maine |
Occupation | businessman |
Known for | invented chewing gum |
Signature | |
John Bacon Curtis (October 10, 1827 – June 13, 1897) was an American businessman from Maine. He is credited as the inventor of chewing gum, as well as the first person to commercialize it using natural products and flavorings. He got the idea for making chewing gum after seeing loggers chew spruce resin. He started with this product and changed it a couple of years later to a flavored paraffin wax gum, which was more successful. He eventually built a factory in Maine that employed some 200 employees and produced several brands of chewing gum. From the profits he made from his business, he expanded into commercial farming and owned over 10,000 acres (4,000 ha) of land. He had become wealthy and by the time he died at the age of 70 in 1897 he was worth $15.9 million in 2021 dollars.
Curtis, son of John Curtis and Mary Brown (Bacon) Curtis, was born in Hampden, Maine, on October 10, 1827. His siblings were Charles H. and Mary E. Curtis. [1] He attended normal schools while growing up. He never graduated, but worked instead for the family as a teenager to earn a living. Curtis worked as a farmhand and a swamper clearing roads through the woods by removing underbrush and downed trees, blocking out the roads to prepare for their final construction. Initially, he earned a salary of $5 (equivalent to $145in 2021) a month, later that was increased to $16 a month, and eventually he worked his way up to $24 a month. [2]
While he worked, Curtis noticed loggers chewing spruce resin. He thought it could be a commercial product and went about gathering up spruce resin. He boiled it, skimmed it off, poured it, cooled it, rolled it, cut it up into small pieces, dusted the pieces with cornstarch and wrapped them individually. In 1848, Curtis sold two of these pieces for one penny (¢31 in 2021) as a chewing gum. [4] His family had moved to Bangor in 1848 and over a Franklin stove in the Curtis home, they cooked up their first batch. [5] The labelled their product "State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum"; the name of their new firm became Curtis & Son. [6] Curtis took the initial quantity that had been produced to Portland, some 130 miles (210 km) away, to market. He went to every merchant over three days before he was able to sell his merchandise to a store. There was very little market for his unflavored gum product in 1848 and 1849. [2] He then in 1850 became a traveling salesman with a sales wagon covering the New England states as his territory. He sold flavored paraffin gum, which was much more popular. [7]
Curtis was ambitious and would often travel, before his competition, into the night to get to the next town first. In this way, he would have most of that town's business as the wholesale peddler and be their principal supplier. He made $6,000 (equivalent to $200,000in 2021) in 1850. [2] This was the first commercial production and sales of chewing gum. [8] Eventually, Curtis advanced from being just a wholesaler to a commercial sales traveler and included the American Old West—areas west of Maine such as Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota and Missouri—in his territory. He traveled on the Erie Canal and down the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers. He would extend credit for as much as a year. He was one of the first, if not the very first, commercial sales broker as a representative of an Eastern business marketing firm in the United States. [2] [9]
Curtis's father tended to the making of the chewing gum product while Curtis traveled to sell it. His father had his men pick the gum from spruce trees. After collecting a sufficient amount of the raw product, they would bring it out of the woods to the Bangor factory for processing. The business did well and the fifteen square foot processing area became too small. They moved their chewing gum business to larger facilities in Portland, Maine. A few pounds of raw material were adequate in their first years of production; however, later they bought up to ten tons of spruce gum at a time. This was considered very risky. One day in the mid-1860s, Curtis purchased $35,000 (equivalent to $620,000in 2021) worth of raw gum material in what was likely the largest transaction in that type of business in the nineteenth century. [10]
In 1852, Curtis & Son expanded the business to occupy a factory that was 51 feet (16 m) x 145 feet (44 m) in area and three stories high. They employed 200 people, who turned out eighteen hundred boxes of chewing gum per day. [11] Curtis invented most of the machinery used in the production process. He never took out a patent on any of his inventions. Instead, the firm kept their process to make chewing gum secret. [10] Some of the spruce gums Curtis & Son made were called "American Flag", "Yankee Pure Spruce", "White Mountain", "200 Lump Spruce", "Licorice Lulu", "Trunk Spruce", "Sugar Cream," "Four-in-Hand" and "Biggest and Best. [12] [13]
In 1872, Curtis went into the dredging business. He worked on jobs that ranged from $50,000 (equivalent to $1,130,000in 2021) to $500,000 (equivalent to $11,980,000in 2021). Curtis was successful at this business as well. He later opened a shipyard and built ten large ships. He also owned the controlling interest in the ferry between Portland and South Portland, Maine, and a line of steamers until 1896. Curtis was even in the silver and coal mining business in Maine. In 1880, Curtis was farming on a grand scale near Gothenburg, Nebraska. Here he owned over 10,000 acres (40 km2) where he raised 3,500 Hereford cattle and 1,200 hogs. [14] One year he harvested 75,000 bushels of corn, 12,000 bushels of wheat, 9,500 bushels of rye, 8,000 bushels of oats and 2,000 bushels of barley. [12]
Curtis married Alice Charlotte Bacon of Rockton, Illinois, there on August 13, 1878. That year, Curtis bought the largest and most expensive house in Deering Center, Maine. During the last months of his life, he took an interest in ancient Egypt and the pyramids. His creed was "do good." [15] Curtis died at his home on June 13, 1897. [16] In his will he bequeathed his $500,000 (equivalent to $16,290,000in 2021) fortune to trustees to be invested and the income to be paid to his wife. [17] After her death the residue went to personal bequests and several public institutions including $20,000 (equivalent to $650,000in 2021) to the town of Bradford for the construction of a library. [18] It was to be a free public library for the advancement of nonsectarian education. The library is named the John B. Curtis Free Public Library in his honor and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. [19] The buff brick and granite building at Bradford Corners was dedicated March 15, 1915. [20]
Bangor is a city in the U.S. state of Maine and the county seat of Penobscot County. The city proper has a population of 31,753, making it the state's 3rd-largest settlement, behind Portland (68,408) and Lewiston (37,121).
Chewing gum is a soft, cohesive substance designed to be chewed without being swallowed. Modern chewing gum is composed of gum base, sweeteners, softeners/plasticizers, flavors, colors, and, typically, a hard or powdered polyol coating. Its texture is reminiscent of rubber because of the physical-chemical properties of its polymer, plasticizer, and resin components, which contribute to its elastic-plastic, sticky, chewy characteristics.
Big League Chew is an American brand of bubble gum that was created by Portland Mavericks left-handed pitcher Rob Nelson and bat boy and future filmmaker Todd Field. It was then pitched to the Wrigley Company by fellow Maverick and former New York Yankee All-Star Jim Bouton as a fun imitation of the tobacco-chewing habit common among ballplayers in the 1970s. Over 800 million pouches of Big League Chew have been sold since 1980. Big League Chew was introduced in May 1980, in the traditional pink color already seen in established brands of bubble gum. The cartoony packaging, originally designed by artist Bill Mayer, comes in flashy colors such as neon green and bright purple. The original shredded R&D concept samples of the product were actually produced by running standard sheets of bubble gum through a standard office paper shredder.
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Spruce gum is a chewing material made from the resin of spruce trees. In North America, spruce resin was chewed by Native Americans, and was later introduced to the early American pioneers and was sold commercially by the 19th century, by John B. Curtis amongst others. It has also been used as an adhesive. Indigenous women in North America used spruce gum to caulk seams of birch-bark canoes.
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William Finley Semple (1832-1923) was a dentist from Mount Vernon, Ohio, commonly referred to as the first person anywhere to patent a chewing gum. On December 28, 1869, Semple filed Patent No. 98,304 with the U.S. Commissioner of Patents. However, Amos Tyler of Toledo, Ohio, patented his chewing gum on July 27 of the same year. John B. Curtis successfully sold his "State of Maine Pure Spruce Gum" in 1848, though he did not patent it.
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The 2018 Maine gubernatorial election took place on November 6, 2018, to elect the next Governor of Maine. It occurred along with elections for the U.S. Senate, U.S. House, and other state and local elections. Incumbent Republican Governor Paul LePage was term limited and could not seek reelection to a third consecutive term in office although he later announced his campaign for a third term in the 2022 election.
The John B. Curtis Free Public Library is the public library of Bradford, Maine. It is located at 435 Main Road in the village center, in an architecturally distinguished 1915 Classical Revival building designed by John Calvin Stevens and John Howard Stevens. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997.
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