Originally posted on December 26, 2002 @ 11:01 pm
Life Savers were invented in 1912 by Clarence Crane, who had been making and selling chocolate candy in the Cleveland area since 1891 and thought to augment his product line with a non-melting candy during the summer when chocolate sales were slow.
Crane envisioned a round, flat peppermint in preference to the pillow-shaped ones then being imported from Europe and he hired a pharmaceutical pill maker to press his new mints into a circle and punch a hole in them. It was their shape that inspired the name – they looked like life savers, so Life Savers they became. What we now view primarily as a sweet was back then marketed as a breath improver: the original product packaging pictured an old seaman throwing a life preserver to a young female swimmer with the slogan “For That Stormy Breath,” and Life Savers’ early market breakthrough came when saloon owners were sold on offering them in place of the free cloves they usually provided for their patrons to chew.
In 1913 Crane sold his struggling Life Savers line to two New York businessmen for $2,900. One of those men, Edward Noble, devised the now familiar tinfoil wrapper because the candies too quickly lost their flavor in the original packaging, a cardboard tube.