PEZ Invention Saves Dying Girl After Docs ‘Gave Up’

It was the summer of 1927 in Vienna, Austria when confectioner Eduard Haas III was working late one night developing new hard candy creations in his small shop. As Eduard tinkered with refined sugar and pressed peppermint oils into various shapes, he peeked over to smile proudly at his 9-year old daughter, Ava, who frequently kept him company in the kitchen lab as he cooked up new sweets.

But as Ava reached for a piece of licorice, she suddenly started gasping desperately, hands clasping her throat. Eduard watched in horror as his daughter’s windpipe swelled rapidly closed. He sprang over to try to pry her jaw open or perform some other measure to allow air flow, but her blocked airway caused her face to turn blue, her life slipping away within minutes. In a panicked last resort, Eduard grabbed a straw and a sharp knife, plunging the blade through her throat, allowing the straw to pierce an emergency airway through the swelling.

Miraculously, Ava coughed back to consciousness as air reentered her starved lungs down the crude tracheotomy straw. As she recovered in the hospital over the next weeks though, she was without voice or the ability to ingest anything orally.

Eduard devised a way for bedridden Ava to ingest sugar for nourishment as she recovered, he specifically made small compressed fruit-flavored sugar wafers to be as smooth and easily dissolvable as possible for his daughter’s condition. These delicate candy wafers were designed to be handed one-by-one down Ava’s throat directly rather than chewed, without risking damage to the freshly cut tracheotomy opening.

Observing his clever yet still crude candy-and-straw method of feeding and sustaining young Ava, Eduard visualized improving upon the concept. Gazing thoughtfully at his worktable spread with molds and casting parts, his eyes landed on a rectangular tin lozenge container. Running his finger along the thin opening meant to carefully dispense the medicinal throat lozenges, Eduard had a revelation about the ideal candy vessel.

He fine-tuned a metal tool to compress precise doses of candy powder into tiny, slender bricks before sculpting a miniature lozenge-style dispenser box with a thin, gently notched opening at the top. This new prototype allowed an individual candy wafer to slide up perfectly into alignment, positioned to easily descend down into Ava’s throat. The non-edged, smooth-surfaced slit was perfectly shaped for Ava to comfortably suck the candy nugget from its holder down into her trachea, delivering a flavorful, nourishing burst straight to her gullet.

As they tested and refined this candy-lozenge dispenser system’s form and function for Ava’s specific needs, Eduard tweaked and patented his designs, enchanted as Ava delightedly “spoke” in sweet flavors through her tracheotomy straw with each fresh PEZ dispensed. Before long, PEZ dispensers with signature notched openings specially created to gently cater to his daughter’s throat and injury were revolutionizing both candy and medical remedy consumption for children worldwide.

News spread of Eduard’s confectionery contraption for his daughter. Orders flowed in from doctors, families and even opera singers seeking the candy dispensers. Touched by all those the personalized candy helped, Eduard Haas decided to mass produce these creations, naming them in honor of his daughter “PEZ” — short for “Pfefferminz” Ava. And so the PEZ dispenser was born, ultimately delighting children and adults worldwide, thanks to a father’s love and inventive way to give his daughter nourishment when she needed it most.