<center id="e206k"></center> Walter Diemer, who invented bubble gum（泡泡糖）, died at age 93.
Mr Diemer was an accountant for Fleer Chewing Gum Co. in Philadelphia when he began testing recipes for a gum base, the part that makes gum chewy, in his spare time in 1928. He created the first batch of bubble gum by chance, making it pink because that was the only shade of food coloring on hand. "It was an accident," Mr Diemer said in a 1996 interview with the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal. "I was doing something else and ended up with something with bubbles."
Americans had been chewing gum since 1870, when a New Yorker named Charles Adams began manufacturing it in a Manhattan warehouse. By the 1920s, a handful of 人 companies were making gum from chicle, a form of sapodilla tree sap（樹液） that had been chewed in Belize, Guatemala and Mexico for centuries. Mr Diemer's pink concoction（調(diào)和物） was stretchier and less sticky than earlier recipes.
Fleer Co. took over the recipe and called it Dubble Bubble, selling the gum for a penny apiece. Mr Diemer helped market Dubble Bubble by teaching salesmen to blow bubbles so they could demonstrate the product. Dubble Bubble had no competition until after World War II, when Topps Co. began wrapping bubble gum in comics and calling it Bazooka.
Mr Diemer, who had begun working for Fleer after high school, never received royalties for his invention, said his wife, Florence Freeman Kohler Diemer. He did receive hundreds of letters from children thanking him for bubble gum, she said. He rarely, chewed gum, but he would invite children to his home and tell them about his invention, then preside over bubble-blowing contests, his wife said. "He was terrifically proud of it," she said. "He would say to me, ‘I've done something with my life; I've made kids happy around the world.' " Mr Diemer eventually became senior vice president of Fleer, retiring in 1970.
