Bubble Gum Trivia
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This bubble gum trivia quiz has 49 free questions with answers and starts with the 1928 accident that gave us pink Dubble Bubble and works back through 5,000-year-old birch-tar gum, Aztec chicle, the exiled Mexican general who handed it to Thomas Adams, and the soap salesman named Wrigley who built the biggest gum company on Earth. It covers the brands and their stories: Black Jack, Chiclets, Juicy Fruit, Doublemint's twins, Bazooka Joe, Bubble Yum's spider-egg rumour, Big League Chew's bullpen origins and Hubba Bubba. Then the odd corners: Singapore's ban, Rome's one-euro-per-wad clean-up, the record 23-inch bubble, Seattle's Gum Wall, Chuck Yeager's lucky Beemans and what xylitol does to your teeth. Easy questions suit kids' parties and candy-themed quizzes; the harder dates and names will test snack historians. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries before publishing.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which bubble gum did Fleer accountant Walter Diemer invent in 1928 while tinkering with recipes in his spare time?
Dubble Bubble
Dubble Bubble. His test batch sold out at a Philadelphia shop in a single afternoon at a penny apiece, yet Diemer never received a royalty for inventing it.
Q 02Why is bubble gum traditionally pink?
Pink was the only dye on hand
Pink was the only dye on hand. Walter Diemer's first workable batch at the Fleer factory in 1928 came out a dingy grey, so he coloured it with what was there, and the shade became the standard.
Q 03What did Frank Fleer call the bubble gum he made in 1906, which proved too sticky to sell?
Blibber-Blubber
Blibber-Blubber. It was brittle as well as sticky, so it never reached the shops, and Fleer died in 1921 with the problem unsolved; his own company finally cracked it in 1928.
Q 04A lump of birch-tar chewing gum found in Finland, tooth marks intact, dates back roughly how far?
5,000 years
5,000 years. A British student dug it up at a Stone Age site in 2007; birch tar holds antiseptic compounds, so its Neolithic chewers may have been treating gum infections.
Q 05Which peoples chewed chicle, a natural tree gum, centuries before modern chewing gum existed?
The Maya and Aztecs
The Maya and Aztecs. The Maya chewed it to stave off hunger and thirst; among the Aztecs, only children and unmarried women could chew it in public.
Q 06Which exiled Mexican leader, living in New York in the 1860s, supplied the chicle behind Thomas Adams's first chewing gum?
Antonio López de Santa Anna
Antonio López de Santa Anna. The general who took the Alamo was living in exile on Staten Island, and hoped the sap from home would earn the fortune he needed to return to power.
Q 07Before selling chicle as chewing gum, Thomas Adams tried and failed to make it a cheap substitute for which material?
Rubber
Rubber. The plan was tyres, but every experiment failed; left with his stockpile, Adams boiled it into plain gum balls, and the first batch sold out at a local drugstore.
Q 08John B. Curtis's 1848 State of Maine gum, the first commercial chewing gum, was made from which tree's resin?
Spruce
Spruce. Settlers had learned to chew the resin from Native Americans; Curtis boiled it on a stove and cut it into sticks, and within a few years he had built the first gum factory.
Q 09Which flavouring goes into Black Jack, the chewing gum Thomas Adams launched in the 19th century?
Liquorice
Liquorice. Black Jack was dropped in the 1970s rush to sugarless gum, then revived in 1986 after a decade of letters from chewers asking for it back.
Q 10William Wrigley Jr. reached Chicago in 1891 selling which product, before his free gifts of baking powder, then gum, proved more popular?
Scouring soap
Scouring soap. He had sold soap for his father since he was 13, and each time customers preferred the giveaway he switched to selling that instead, until gum was all he sold.
Q 11Which company bought Wrigley for about $23 billion in 2008?
Mars
Mars. Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway helped finance the takeover; he said he had been running a 70-year taste test on both companies' sweets since he was about seven.
Q 12In 1974, which Wrigley gum became the first product ever sold by scanning a UPC barcode?
Juicy Fruit
Juicy Fruit. The test shopper, the supermarket chain's own research chief, later said he picked the ten-pack on purpose, to honour Wrigley's work on getting barcodes onto its packs.
Q 13Wrigley's Doublemint gum is famous for decades of advertising featuring what?
Identical twins
Identical twins. The Doublemint Twins were a play on the 'double' in the name: they began as poster drawings in 1939, and real pairs took over once the ads moved to television.
Q 21Seattle's famous Gum Wall is found beneath which landmark?
Pike Place Market
Pike Place Market. People queuing for an improv comedy theatre began sticking gum to the alley wall in the 1990s; the market had it scraped clean more than once before giving in and calling it an attraction.
Q 22Which sweetener, common in sugar-free gum, is safe for people but can poison a dog?
Xylitol
Xylitol. In dogs, unlike people, it sets off a rush of insulin that can crash blood sugar within the hour, so vets warn owners to keep sugar-free gum well out of reach.
Q 23What set Chiclets apart when they went on sale in the early 1900s?
A hard candy coating
Q 14Which company launched Bazooka bubble gum in Brooklyn in 1947?
Topps
Topps. All it wanted from the baseball cards it added to its packs in the early 1950s was a way to sell more gum, but the cards soon became the bigger business.
Q 15Which soft bubble gum was hit in 1977 by a playground rumour that it contained spider eggs?
Bubble Yum
Bubble Yum. Its maker, Life Savers, spent about $100,000 on full-page newspaper ads to deny the story, and sales recovered.
Q 16Big League Chew, the shredded gum sold in a pouch, was dreamed up in a bullpen to imitate what?
Chewing tobacco
Chewing tobacco. A Portland Mavericks pitcher dreamed it up with the team's bat boy, Todd Field, who grew up to direct the film Tár; a former Yankee then sold the idea to Wrigley.
Q 17Hubba Bubba bubble gum takes its name from 'hubba hubba', a cry of approval popularised by whom?
WWII military personnel
WWII military personnel. The cry spread from the forces to become a teenage craze by 1946, and Wrigley borrowed it for its new bubble gum in 1979.
Q 18Which country banned the sale of chewing gum in 1992?
Singapore
Singapore. Gum stuck on door sensors had been stalling its new metro trains; told the ban would stifle creativity, Lee Kuan Yew replied: 'If you can't think because you can't chew, try a banana.'
Q 19In Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, which child chews Wonka's experimental gum and swells into a giant blueberry?
Violet Beauregarde
Violet Beauregarde. The compulsive gum-chewer tries Wonka's unfinished three-course-dinner gum: tomato soup, roast beef, then a blueberry pie course that turns her into the fruit.
Q 20Roughly how wide was the bubble-gum bubble that put Susan Montgomery Williams in Guinness World Records in 1994?
23 inches
23 inches. She steadied it with her fingers; as of 2026 the record Guinness lists is a smaller, 20-inch bubble that Chad Fell blew in 2004 without using his hands.
A hard candy coating. The little tablets caught on so widely that in Brazil and Portugal 'chiclete' became the everyday word for chewing gum of any make.
Q 24Which gum, an aviators' good-luck charm, did Chuck Yeager reportedly chew before every flight?
Beemans
Beemans. It began as a way to sell pepsin, a stomach remedy taken from hogs, and flopped until the firm's bookkeeper talked Dr Beeman into taking the pig off the wrapper.
Q 25Which cartoon band topped the US charts in 1969 with 'Sugar, Sugar', the defining hit of bubblegum pop?
The Archies
The Archies. No such band existed: session singer Ron Dante and friends recorded as the comic-book teenagers for a Saturday-morning cartoon, and still had Billboard's number one song of the year.
Q 26Lyndon Johnson's jibe that a rival 'can't walk and chew gum at the same time' was aimed at which future president?
Gerald Ford
Gerald Ford. That is the cleaned-up version: Johnson's own wording had Ford unable to break wind and chew gum at once, and reporters swapped in 'walk' to make it printable.
Q 27Which gum brand made 'four out of five dentists surveyed' a famous advertising line?
Trident
Trident. Read the whole line and the dentists never mention the brand: four out of five would recommend sugarless gum, of any make, to those of their patients who chew gum.
Q 28Which sandwich spread is the classic home remedy for getting chewing gum out of hair?
Peanut butter
Peanut butter. Rub it into the wad and wait a few minutes: its oils loosen the gum's grip on the hair, so it can be combed out.
Q 29What did Thomas Adams install on New York's elevated-railway platforms in 1888 to sell his Tutti-Frutti gum?
Vending machines
Vending machines. The gum sold so well from the first that the machines are counted as the start of America's vending business.
Q 30Adams Clove gum became a favourite in American bars because drinkers said it could do what?
Mask boozy breath
Mask boozy breath. The tart, spicy gum reached the shops in 1933, the year Prohibition was repealed, and was sold heavily across the bar.