Chemical Companies That Became Drugmakers
Bayer began in 1863 not as a pharmaceutical company at all, but as a dye manufacturer, founded in Barmen, Germany, by dye salesman Friedrich Bayer and master dyer Johann Friedrich Weskott. The company’s move into medicine came decades later, through the same synthetic organic chemistry expertise that had made it successful in dyes — chemist Felix Hoffmann’s 1897 refinement of acetylsalicylic acid, marketed as Aspirin starting in 1899, transformed a dye company into one of the most recognizable pharmaceutical names in the world. Merck’s origins run even further back: the company traces its history to 1668, when Friedrich Jacob Merck acquired an apothecary in Darmstadt, Germany, making it one of the oldest continuously operating businesses connected to medicine anywhere in the world. That single company split into two separate entities in 1917, when the U.S. government seized the American branch’s assets during World War I under the Trading with the Enemy Act; the American company reorganized as an independent business, Merck & Co., while the original German company continued separately as Merck KGaA — meaning the “Merck” name today refers to two distinct, unrelated companies operating on either side of the Atlantic.
American Pharmaceutical Giants of the Twentieth Century
Pfizer began in 1849 as a fine chemicals business in Brooklyn, founded by German immigrant cousins Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart, initially producing compounds like santonin, an antiparasitic, disguised in a pleasant-tasting form to make it easier to administer. The company’s transformation into a major pharmaceutical manufacturer came during World War II, when Pfizer pioneered a deep-tank fermentation process that dramatically increased penicillin production, making the company the largest producer of the antibiotic by the war’s end and establishing the industrial fermentation techniques still used in pharmaceutical manufacturing today. Eli Lilly and Company, founded in Indianapolis in 1876 by Union Army veteran Colonel Eli Lilly, built its early reputation on manufacturing standardized, quality-controlled medications at a time when many competitors sold unreliable patent remedies; the company’s most consequential early partnership came in 1922, when it worked with the University of Toronto researchers who had just isolated insulin to scale production from laboratory quantities to a commercial supply capable of treating diabetic patients nationwide.
Johnson & Johnson, founded in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1886 by brothers Robert, James, and Edward Mead Johnson, built its original business directly on the antiseptic surgical principles Joseph Lister had championed a decade earlier — the company’s first products were ready-made, sterile surgical dressings, designed to bring consistent antiseptic practice to hospitals that had previously relied on dressings prepared inconsistently on-site, often by hand, in conditions that varied widely from one hospital pharmacy to the next. That founding focus on standardized, sterile medical products would eventually expand into consumer health, medical devices, and pharmaceuticals, but the underlying premise — applying scientific rigor to problems previously left to inconsistent local practice — connects each of these companies’ origin stories, whether the founding insight came from a chemistry lab, a family apothecary, or an operating room.
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica and the National Institutes of Health (NIH).