Kis-Me Stereoscope | NPG

United States, 1900s

This hard-to-find viewer is part of the NPG family of lithographed tin viewers. It has the small NPG printed in the bottom left corner and, since Kis-me was an American company, it’s marked with the U. S. patent #720849 instead of the German patent. American Chicle was founded in 1899 by merging several popular chewing gum companies into one conglomerate. One of those founding chewing gum companies was Kis-Me chewing gum in Louisville, Kentucky, created around 1886 by Jonathan P. Primley as the first fruit-flavored chewing gum. It wasn’t considered “proper” for girls to chew gum back then so Kis-Me made its slogan “Far better than a kiss” — we guess this was a way of enticing girls to choose the lesser of two evils!