A number of New Haven inventions have changed the course of history—the cotton gin, vulcanized rubber, the telephone exchange.
Less impactful, but more joyful, is the lollipop, or, as it was first called, “lolly pop.”
The world’s first lolly pops weren’t necessarily on a stick. The term had long been used in England and the US as a generic candy catch-all. (Etymologically, dictionaries agree that “lolly” probably refers to a lolling or dangling tongue, all the better for licking, while the origins of “pop” are more mysterious.) People had also long eaten chewy sweets on sticks—like boiled maple sap, which could be poured onto snow to make it taffy-like, then scraped up with a twig. But it was a New Haven company at the turn of the century that conceived a critical innovation: using hard candy instead.
By then, refined sugar had become inexpensive, and mass production techniques had made it possible to cheaply produce infinite identical batons good for keeping sweet-toothed fingers clean. Those developments gave George P. Smith, co-owner of the local Bradley Smith candy company, founded in 1892, the assets he would need to make history.
But they didn’t give him a vital third element: inspiration. That came by way of a local competitor, who’d begun putting chewy chocolate taffy on sticks. In 1902, he directed his company to begin putting harder stuff on wooden rods, making it the first known enterprise to do so. The new product line, called Yale Lolly Pops, soon hit the shelves, its wrappers and tins emblazoned with the company’s name and location. The company also sold stickless hard candies, chocolates, molasses-based confections and, in earlier years, cigars.
Sensing a sensation, other businesses began putting hard candy on sticks as well. “Old and Young Succumb to the Candy on a Stick!” trumpeted the Hartford Courant on July 18, 1904. By 1909, when Bradley Smith employee Max Buchmüller submitted a patent for a machine capable of shaping the sweets and inserting the sticks, the pop-making process was becoming fully mechanized.
Still, the journey into food history was a bumpy one. In the freewheeling days of early food standards, there were scattered deaths attributed, rightly or wrongly, to cheap penny candy, especially lollipops. In 1914, presumably in response to rumors or accusations, the Bradley Smith Company offered a $50 reward and a strongly worded call for proof that their Lolly Pops contained poison. (For what it’s worth, the idea might not have been so unfounded: In 1912, the federal government slapped the company with a fine after finding that the glaze of its London Cream candies contained arsenic.)
Though the Lolly Pop debuted long before, the company wasn’t awarded a trademark for the name until 1931. By then it was too late to matter, with the economy in shambles during the Great Depression and the ascendant alternate “lollipop” skirting right around the mark. The company struggled, eventually going out of business before being reformed in 1938 as a candy distributor and packager, which survived with faded glory until 1984.
Local reminders of this history persist. There are lollipops for sale, of course. Visitors can find a long-running exhibition, From Clocks to Lollipops: Made in New Haven, at the New Haven Museum and a collection of Bradley Smith Co. tins at Lost in New Haven. The closest thing to a public monument to New Haven’s role in lollipop history might be Gallows and Lollipops, the large, whimsical Alexander Calder sculpture in the garden behind the Yale University Art Gallery, with visual elements that remind of lollipops and a title that nods to the fate of the local company that first stuck hard candy to stick.
Written by Anne Ewbank. Image, featuring Bradley Smith candy company lolly pop and hard candy tins at Lost in New Haven, photographed by Dan Mims. This updated story was originally published on October 5, 2017.
