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As it turned out, spruce resin proved to be less-than-ideal for producing gum: It didn’t taste great and became brittle when chewed. Curtis and others who’d jumped into the gum business after him subsequently switched to ingredients such as paraffin wax. The next key development came when an inventor in New York, Thomas Adams, got his hands on some chicle through exiled Mexican president Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna. Exactly how the two men connected remains unclear, although they would’ve been in contact following Santa Anna’s arrival in the United States sometime after the mid-1850s. (Before that, he led Mexican forces at the Battle of the Alamo in 1836 and served multiple terms as Mexico’s president.)
