CHEWING GUM AND THE MACHINES THAT SOLD IT!
Cover Story by Roger Smith, Randy Razzoog, Dave Cook, Ken Rubin and Alex Warschaw
For many decades in the last century, vending
and chewing gum were virtually synonymous - put
a penny in a vending machine and you were buying
gum. Want to buy gum? You would likely get it
from a vendor, more often then not, found sitting
on a merchant's counter. Long before soft drinks
and bottled water, the bulk of vending sales was
chewing gum. There were even some brands of
chewing gum that appear to only have been sold
through vendors. For many collectors of coin-oper-
ated machines, this connection has opened the door
to an interest in chewing gum itself and it is also
why many coin-op collectors were eagerly await-
ing Bill Enes' book on chewing gum. (A book he
was working on at the time of his death and soon to
be published by David Cook.)
The first commercial chewing gum, Curtis and
Son's spruce gum, made first in 1848, was sold
from the countertops of pharmacies. For the next
40 years, spruce and paraffin gums were sold from
counter-top display boxes for the simple reason
that gum vending machines were virtually non-
existent. While examples of vending, such as the
honor box that sold tobacco for a penny, did exist,
it wasn't until 1888, when vending machines sell-
ing Adams gum were introduced to the elevated
railways of New York city that coin-operated vend-
ing really began to catch on. There were, of course,
examples of vendors that sold everything from
cigars to writing paper, but vending, as an industry,
owes the bulk of its growth to the universal com-
modity of chewing gum.
In the case of the popular Adams vendors, we
know from both history and the physical evidence
that the vendor was secondary to the gum. Not only
was the gum first made and widely distributed well
before the vendors existed, but many examples of
the counter-top sales boxes and displays are wide-
ly available. Many of the existent Adams gum
vending machines carry prominent patent numbers
that allow us to unravel more of the story. In the
case of the Adams machines, the patent records
show the inventor not be be Adams, who was an
inventor himself, but rather John A. Williams of
Brooklyn, New York. Now we all know that
Thomas Adams, Sr. was from Brooklyn, so it might
be logical that Williams might have been an Adams
10
employee, but the patent records indicate that the
patents were assigned to "the Williams Automatic
Machine company, of Moundsville, West
Virginia." We don't know at this point if the asso-
ciation between these machines, which prominent-
ly carry the Adams name, was one of direct corpo-
rate interaction (subsidiary, contract, other?) or just
a man-iage of convenience - an opportunity to
make money from a popular brand, just like con-
temporary ties to trendy brands, cun-ent movies, or
celebrities.
Another example of chewing gums preceding
the associated vendors are the popular chewing
gums made by John Colgan. In Louisville,
Kentucky, John Colgan, a pharmacist, had been
selling a chewing gum made from balsam gum
sweetened with sugar. Hearing of Thomas Adams '
success with the chicle base, Colgan decided to
market a tastier gum. In 1879, Colgan took a gam-
ble and purchased 1,500 pounds of chicle (the
smallest amount he could get) and set about blend-
ing it with the spicy aromatic sap of the Balsam
Tolu tree, a flavoring base for many cough mix-
tures. "Colgan's Taffy-Tolu Chewing Gum - the
Tolu-Flavored Chew" was an overnight success.
Despite beautiful advertising designed to create
brand loyalty, within a year there were more than
ten other companies making Tolu-flavored gums.
John Colgan sold his chewing gum from his phar-
macy but also hit on another scheme that expanded
his market dramatically - he enlisted an army of
children who sold his gums from hand baskets car-
ried on-board streetcars and trains. Like latter day
paperboys, these diminutive hawkers sold the gum
on consignment. When Colgan's gum was sold
from vendors, they were vendors made by the
National Vending Machine Company. Here again,
it is apparent that the bulk of the sales were not by
way of the machines.
There are many examples where the relation-
ship gum and vending machines was the other way
around - the vendors were the major, if not only,
point of sales. One of the best-known examples of
this is the popular line of Pulver vendors. While
there are references to Pulver stick gum and extant
examples of these packs survive, far and away the
most commonly found examples of Pulver gums