While some think that it was the Native Americans who first discovered maple syrup, another school of thought does not agree and thinks that the Natives did not have the tools and technology to come up with maple syrup or maple sugar. To them, the fur traders and white settlers who first introduced wooden buckets and copper and iron kettles to the maple syrup process could be the ones that can truly be regarded as the first to have made maple syrup.
Although the Natives are the ones who showed how to tap the tree and get the sap, the settlers were the ones who really made the process work and came up with the maple syrup as well as high quality maple sugar. They later had their own way of collecting the sap, by boring holes and then hanging buckets on homemade spouts to gather the sap.
Today, the developments in the technological aspects of making maple syrup continue, creating things like organic candain maple sugar. Improvements in the tubing processes also continue. Some new methods are employed such as “supercharged” pre-heaters, new filtering techniques and better storage procedures.