What’s In A Kiss? Historical Kissing Facts

What's Valentine's Day without a kiss?

Here are some great historical facts about "the kiss" from Redbook.

• A.D. 300 -- The original Breathalyzer. Roman husbands kissed their wives when they came home from work, not as an ancient version of "Hi, honey; I'm home" but rather to determine whether the misses had been hitting the bottle during the day.
• 1590s -- Romeo dies with a kiss. The first known performance of Shakespeare's famous play concludes with the lip locked demise of two star crossed lovers.
• 1763 -- Kissing is "X"-ed. Kissing is first symbolized by the letter "x," as in "xoxo."
• 1896 -- First movie kiss. The first on-screen smooch happened between John Rice and May Irwin in the movie The Kiss. The less than a minute film was shown during the closing scene of the Broadway play The Widow Jones and caused outrage at the time.
• 1907 -- Invention of the Hershey's Kiss. It's rumored that the candy was named after the sound the machine made as it dropped the chocolate onto the conveyor belt.
• 1923 -- The French kiss catches on. When British and American women got wind of this sensual kissing style, the soon dubbed it the "French kiss," intended as a slander toward their oversexed European sisters. But it didn't take them long to realize that French women were on to something good.
• 1937 -- Prince Charming awakens Snow White. Take one princess who's the fairest in the land plus one Prince Charming, and you have the classic Disney love story.
• 1945 -- Life magazine sweeps us off our feet. Its famous cover photo of a sailor kissing a nurse on the street became an iconic image of true romance.
• 1990 -- Most kisses per minute. Alfred Wolfram kissed 8,001 people in eight hours, that's more than 16 people per minute, at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival.
• 2003 -- Madonna and Britney smooch. Jaws dropped worldwide as viewers witnessed Madge and Brit's daring kiss at the MTV Video Music Awards.