Walter Diemer, a 23-year-old accountant for Fleer Co. of Philadelphia, invented bubble gum in 1928. The secret formula had defied the best food scientists for decades.
Walter Diemer made it more fun to be a kid. Business owners and ballplayers smiled with profit and pleasure, too, after chewing on his contribution to global consumer culture. Diemer invented bubble gum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1928. It was an unexpected moment of inspiration for the high-school graduate gum-company accountant with a side hustle as a home-kitchen chemist.
Diemer mixed creativity, curiosity and instinct with a little bit of luck and pink food coloring to change the reason humans chew. The young man, just 23 at the time, had no scientific training. But he had passion for the creative process and a willingness to fail. 'He’s the perfect example of 100% American ingenuity,' Lee Wardlaw, the California-based author of 'Bubblemania: A Chewy History of Bubblegum,' told Fox News Digital.
If he tells them to build a palace 40 miles long out of di’monds and fill it full of chewing gum,' the title character of Mark Twain's 1884 novel 'Huckleberry Finn' enthused, 'they’ve got to do it.' The 1920s were an era of prohibited pleasure, however. Alcohol was outlawed with the Volstead Act of 1919.
Diemer remained undaunted. He spent a year testing recipes at home, apparently with the approval — and bemused low expectations — of his bosses. Coworkers were stunned when the young accountant walked into the office in August 1928 carrying a 5-pound batch of his latest home-cooked gum. He blew a bubble larger than anyone had seen. 'It finally popped softly,' Wardlaw writes, 'and he easily peeled it off his skin.' 'I had it! Everybody tried some,' Diemer later recalled.
He was terrifically proud of it,' his wife Florence Diemer said, as reported in several tributes. 'He would say to me, 'I've done something with my life. I've made kids happy around the world.'' To read more stories in this unique 'Meet the American Who…' series from Fox News Digital, click here. For more Lifestyle articles, visit www.foxnews.com/lifestyle.
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