NewHavenBIZ

50 n e w h a v e n B I Z | S e p t e m b e r / O c t o b e r 2 0 1 9 | n e w h a v e n b i z . c o m T H E L O O P ARCHIVE 125 Suckers Born Every Minute By Michael C. Bingham The original Bradley, Smith Co. storefront on Grand Ave. in New Haven. Sweetest of the Sweets I t's not exactly up there with the hamburger or the Frisbee, but New Haven can credibly stake a claim to being the birthplace of one of the world's most cher- ished confections: the lollipop. Actually, that's "Lolly Pop" to you, pal. at is the spelling legally registered to the Bradley Smith Co. of New Haven in 1931 by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office. e candy company, founded in 1892 and located on Grand Ave. in Fair Haven, actually began making a hard-candy confection on a stick as early as 1908. Two factors helped fuel the company's growth: By the turn of the 20th century refined sugar had become inexpensive, and techniques of mass production had made it easier and cheaper to produce identical dainties that sated countless sweet tooths (and covered country-club dues for generations of dentists). Bradley Smith Co. half- namesake George P. Smith took his inspiration from a chocolate taffy-on-a-stick confection produced in West Haven and sold as Reynolds Taffy. Smith came up with the name "Lolly Pop," supposedly inspired by the name of a racehorse Smith had seen at a local fair. e first examples of the company's new product line were packaged and sold as Yale Tiny Lolly Pops. (Over the years the trade name Lolly Pop and its generic equivalent lollipop became interchangeable in common usage until the trademark could no longer be maintained.) Bradley Smith Co. workers produced the first lollipops by cutting off small chunks of warm hard candy and jabbing a wooden stick into the so center by hand. During the process of inserting the stick, the spherical dollop of candy was slightly flattened in the worker's palm, creating a distinctive shape. is changed when company foreman Max Buchmuller invented and patented a machine to insert the sticks mechanically. e new device allowed the company to produce 125 Lolly Pops per minute. Eventually mechanical refinements increased that production capacity to 750 of the sweets in each 60-second interval. is mass production allowed Bradley Smith to meet demand for the now-mass-produced Lolly Pops from across the nation — and eventually to ship them across oceans to new markets in England and even China. ere were a few bumps along the road to universal acceptance and affection. In the wild and wooly days preceding the passage of the Pure Food & Drug Act of 1906, deaths were frequently attributed (both rightly and wrongly) to all manner of comestibles, not least of all seemingly benign confections such as Lolly Pops. In 1914, the Bradley Smith company offered a $50 reward to the public for proof that its product contained any poison. (at fear was not entirely unfounded: Two years earlier the federal government had fined the New Haven company aer finding that the glaze coating one of its candies contained arsenic.) But the company's Lolly Pops were never a cause for blame, and thus never put to shame. Best of all, the first Lolly Pops sold for the low, low, low price of one cent — the quintessential penny candy. n

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