Walter E. Diemer; Inventor of Bubble Gum

Walter E. Diemer, who accidentally invented bubble gum while testing recipes in 1928, is dead at 93.

Diemer’s invention, developed when he was a 23-year-old accountant for a chewing gum company, became the bane of parents throughout the world, but remains the pleasure of countless youngsters--and some adults.

By the 1990s, the gum, which originally sold for a penny a piece, was ringing up sales exceeding $1.2 billion a year. In 1991, it was calculated that children were chewing 150,000 pounds a day of the primarily pink gum.

And how did it get its color? “Pink food coloring was the only thing I had on hand,” the inventor once said.

Diemer, who died Thursday in a hospital near his home in Lancaster, Pa., built an entire career on his discovery of a gum that stretched farther than most and could be used to fashion bubbles.

Chewing gum dated from 1870 and the effort to develop a gum that would blow bubbles went back to 1906.

But first efforts, by the owner of the Fleer Corp., a small gum manufacturer, had been unappealing. The gum was too brittle and, when it broke apart, stuck to the chewer’s face.

Henry Fleer, the company’s founder, encouraged his employees to try for a better product, and Diemer liked to putter around in the company lab.

His success ultimately made him senior vice president of Fleer.

Diemer was quoted about the moment of the invention--when he suddenly took a gob out of the pot and blew a magnificent bubble--in Robert Hendrickson’s volume, “The Great American Chewing Gum Book.”

“I had it! Everybody tried some. We were blowing bubbles all over the office. Everyone said, ‘What a great product!’ and it really went to our heads. We were blowing bubbles and prancing all over the place!”

Fleer named it Dubble Bubble and began marketing it in Philadelphia, where it was an immediate hit.