Thursday, February 02, 2006

Bubble Gum Facts

bubblegum pic Interesting Bubble Gum Facts

The average American chews around 300 sticks of gum in a year.

100,000 tons of bubble gum are chewed every year.

San Luis Obispo, California, USA is the home of Bubble Gum Alley, which is an alley with brick walls covered with ABC (already-been-chewed) bubble gum wads.

Richard Walker holds the record for the Chomp Title by chewing 135 sticks of bubble gum for 8 hours. The first person to win the 'Chomp Title' was Sue Jordan, who chewed eighty pieces of Doublemint gum for five hours and twelve minutes! Clyde Steward McGehee, of North Carolina, broke that record by chewing 105 sticks of Juicy Fruit for six hours and Richard Walker broke that record by chewing 135 sticks of gum for eight hours.

The Topps company holds the record for having made the largest single piece of bubble gum. It equaled 10,000 pieces of normal-sized Bazooka.Topps presented the gum to baseball player Willie Mays in 1974. Mays then cut it into small chunks and gave it to children in nearby hospitals.

Bubble Yum bubblegum is the Official Gum of Major League Baseball.

In 1928 the first successful bubble gum was invented.The first known bubble gum, "Blibber Blubber," appeared in 1906. It failed to catch on because it was too sticky and too brittle so it didn't hold together when it was chewed.The first successful bubblegum was invented by Walter E. Diemer in the summerof 1928. A 23-year-old accountant who knew nothing about chemistry, Diemer created his invention in a tiny laboratory in Philadelphia. The only food coloring he had on hand was pink. "It was an accident," Mr. Diemer said in an interview with The Lancaster Intelligencer Journal in 1996. "I was doing something else and ended up with something with bubbles."

Susan Montgomery Williams is the Guinness Record Holder of the Worlds Largest Gum Bubble. It was 23 inches big.