Walter Diemer was 23, an accountant at the Fairmount candy company Fleer, when he set out in 1928 to make a gum that stretched and held together instead of turning brittle. It worked. His pink Dubble Bubble put bubble-blowing into the hands of kids everywhere, and gave the world a few more blackened spots on the sidewalk.
Philadelphia Magazine counts Diemer’s gum among 76 contributions the city has made to the world beyond the Declaration and the Constitution. The list, edited by Ronnie Polaneczky and timed to the country’s 250th birthday, covers how people heal, learn, shop, protest, eat and entertain themselves. Some entries are famous. Others, the magazine admits, you probably have not heard of.
Boats, flowers and fossils
New Yorkers like to credit Robert Fulton’s Clermont, which made its voyage on August 17, 1807. The magazine says they are wrong. John Fitch launched the first successful steamboat on the Delaware River in 1787, with members of Congress watching from the dock. Fitch then fell into a dispute with another inventor over whose design was best. The litigation helped lead to the Patent Act of 1790. He died broke and unhappily married, and wrote in his diary that he knew of nothing “so perplexing and vexatious to a man of feelings as a turbulent wife and steamboat building.”
The poinsettia has a Philadelphia chapter too. Joel Roberts Poinsett, the first U.S. ambassador to Mexico, sent samples of the plant to Bartram’s Garden in the late 1820s. In 1829 it debuted at what is now the Philadelphia Flower Show. California horticulturist Paul Ecke later marketed it for Christmas, and more than 35 million are now sold in the U.S. each holiday season.
In 1812, a group of amateur naturalists founded the first natural history museum in the Americas. Among them were a dentist, a distiller, a chemist and a physician. Today the Academy of Natural Sciences holds 19 million specimens, including Thomas Jefferson’s fossils and plants collected by Meriwether Lewis. It affiliated with Drexel University in 2011, a relationship the magazine calls financially shaky.
Hard chapters
The list does not skip the ugly parts. In late 1842, Bishop Francis Kenrick asked that Catholic students be read to separately, because the public schools opened each morning with the King James Bible rather than the Catholic Douai version. The request angered the nativist movement. A rally in early May 1844 and a counter-march by Irish Catholic newcomers ended in gunfire, deaths, and mobs burning churches, homes, a fire station and a marketplace. A second outbreak came two months later. Dozens died and hundreds were injured before 5,000 militia members restored order. Kenrick’s answer was the city’s Catholic school system, the first in the country.
Women got their own entry. In 1882 the schoolteacher and poet Eliza Sproat Turner founded the New Century Guild, partly to solve a practical problem: a working woman who ate alone in a public restaurant risked her reputation. The guild gave teachers, clerks, nurses and waitresses a safe place for meals, and it worked toward the vote. Its successor, the Gender Justice Fund, still makes grants.
Sports and stooges
In 1934 the Eagles had a poor season. Owner Bert Bell, a Philadelphia native, proposed that the weakest teams get first pick of the best prospects, and the NFL draft was born. Bell, a former Penn quarterback, is also credited with sudden-death overtime, televised night games, the Pro Bowl, and the ban on gambling by players, coaches and officials.
Larry Fine of the Three Stooges was born at 3rd and South, where a mural now shows him with that haircut. Curly-Joe DeRita, the last Stooge added, also came from Philadelphia.
The Frankford Arsenal in Bridesburg ran from 1816 to 1977. During World War II, when it was the country’s only ammunition maker, it turned out nine million cartridges a day.
