Many have recounted the story of Eduard Haas III of Austria. He is the man who invented the original Peppermint Pez candies in 1927. The story has it that he was strongly against smoking and he developed the candy as something to do instead of smoking. Early advertising campaigns support this with slogans such as ‘No Smoking, Pezzing Allowed’. The name PEZ is derived from the first, middle and last letters in the word Pfefferminz, Peppermint in German. The mints were first sold in small tins, some about the size of the small purse size tin for Bayer Aspirin, and others similar in size to the old Sucrets tins or today’s Altoids tins. Haas later conceived of the idea of being able to offer someone a mint (likely someone who had been smoking) in a hygienic way without touching the candy or having someone else touch all the other candies in the tin.

The story of Oskar Uxa and the invention of the Pez Dispenser.

It is often said that the pez dispenser was designed to look like a cigarette lighter in hopes of providing smokers a substitute to this part of the smoking habit. The problem with this ‘story’ is that cigarette lighters of the time were not shaped like the Bic lighters of today. They were more typically square, lighter fluid filled rather than the longer thinner butane lighter of today. Perhaps today’s lighter should be considered to resemble the first pez dispensers, rather than the other way around. In reality, the goal was to design a convenient, hygienic container to dispense a single tablet, using only one hand and Oskar Uxa was the engineer who designed the Pez Box. The drawing for the patent of the original Pez Dispenser was filed on October, 14, 1949, and on December 2, 1952, the patent number 2.620.061 was issued by the Patent office.