Fleer

Frank Henry Fleer was involved with chewing gum long before his company made history with the invention of bubble gum. The first incarnation of the Fleer family business was founded in 1849 by Otto Holstein, a German Quaker who built a flavoring extracts factory in Philadelphia. Fleer, born in 1860, joined the business after marrying Holstein's daughter and took over operations in the 1880s. Around 1885, Fleer's company began making chewing gum, adding its flavorings to the chicle gum base popular at the time. Chicle, the dried sap from the South and Central American sapodilla tree, was first brought to the United States by the former Mexican president, dictator, and general Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, whose exploits included the attack on the Alamo. In 1869 Santa Anna, who was living in exile in Staten Island, brought chicle to the attention of Thomas Adams. Adams agreed to try to invent a useful product with Santa Anna's chicle, eventually producing a chicle-based chewing gum. Sales of Adams's "New York No. 1" gum were slow at first, but helped by the inclusion in each box of gum of a "prize package" of tickets redeemable for prizes. Adams's business boomed, and soon chicle became the most widely used chewing gum base. The chewing gum habit quickly spread across the United States. Adams later became the first chairman of the American Chicle chewing gum trust, formed in 1899 from the country's five largest chewing gum producers. In the late 1880s, trading cards made their debut. The honor for the first such insert is generally given to James Buchanan Duke, the tobacco magnate and popularizer of pre-rolled cigarettes. When Duke first began to produce packages of his cigarettes, he needed a way to keep the packages from being crushed during shipment. He added a strip of cardboard into the package and shortly after began to feature advertisements on the cardboard strips. Duke's first ads included graphics of popular actors and actresses of the time; by the late 1880s, however, other tobacco companies were adding cards to their packages featuring baseball players. By 1890, some twenty-five sets, or series, of baseball cards had been issued. The inclusion of trading cards would do much to popularize the use of tobacco, and especially cigarettes. The Fleer family business continued making chewing gum, adding cola flavor to the chicle gum by 1897. During the 1880s, Fleer became one of the first companies to sell its gum in coin-operated vending machines. As related in The Great American Chewing Gum Book, Frank Fleer had been approached by a vending machine salesman with a proposal to sell Fleer's gum in the machines. Fleer was skeptical, but when the salesman asserted that the machines were such a novelty that people would be willing to use them even if they received nothing for their penny, Fleer agreed to put the machines to the test. A vending machine was placed at New York City's Flatiron Building, where people were told to "drop a penny in the slot and listen to the wind blow." People did just that, by the hundreds, until the machine was taken away by the police. Fleer ordered several of the vending machines. Fleer's company developed two more significant products around the turn of the century. The first was created by Fleer's brother, Henry Fleer. At the time, candy-coated almonds were a popular treat, and Henry Fleer hit on the idea of coating small pieces of chicle gum with candy. Showing the initial results to his brother, Henry Fleer purportedly referred to his new candy as "little chiclets." Frank Fleer liked the name. "Chiclets" became a huge success, and would remain one of the best-known brand names for chewing gum throughout the next century. By the turn of the century, gum chewing was firmly entrenched in the United States and spreading throughout the world. The companies that would dominate the chewing gum industry through the Twentieth century--American Chicle, Wrigley , and Beech Nut--were already establish