Saccharin
The oldest artificial sweetener also referred to as a synthetic sugar, Saccharin is said to have been discovered in a laboratory at Johns Hopkins University located in Baltimore, Maryland. Saccharin was named after the Latin word saccharum which roughly translates to sugar. The exact date and time of the discovery are not known but the sugar came to be in the month of June 1879. Saccharin was discovered by Russian chemistry research assistant Constantine Fahlberg who was working alongside Ira Remsen in Remsen’s laboratory. Fahlberg spilled a compound he synthesized working on new food preservatives onto his hands. When he went home that night and took a bite of the bread he was having for dinner he noticed an abnormality in the taste.…show more content… Fahlberg rushed back to the laboratory where he tasted just about everything on his work table. After a lot of time and work, he was finally able to produce Saccharin which was “the first commercially viable alternative to cane sugar” (Jesse Hicks). Remsen along Fahlberg and his ingenious discovery published a joint article where the two described two methods on how to synthesize saccharin in February 1879. Saccharin was first used during the first World War. Sugar was being rationed and was in high demand so there rose saccharin’s popularity amongst the United States but especially in countries in Europe. The sugar was used for multiple purposes saccharin producing factory here in the United States and another near Magdeburg, Germany. His new found discovery sold more than well enough to make him a wealthy man. Saccharin was sold by itself in packets but Fahlberg’s main buyers were large food companies that would add saccharin to their products. The sugar had multiple uses, being used as a curative to help with headaches by doctors.Doctors often used this sugar replacement since it came in both powder and pill forms. The product was also used by canners to elongate a so-called…show more content… On a cold December in 1965, an accident happened at a company named G.D Searle. A chemist got some of the tetrapeptide compounds he was synthesizing on his body, in particular, his hands without realizing it. When the chemist was filing through the many papers throughout the lab the next morning, he licked his fingers and tasted a sweetness in his not so usually sweet tasting fingers. Thinking where the sweetness came from his first thought was that it came from a donut he ate that morning but he washed his hands after eating the donut. That fact is interesting because after washing his hands the sweet taste was still there. He then went to the aspartyl phenylalanine methyl he was working with and finally found out that that was the source of the sweetness. The chemist with who'd just discovered this product was called Jim Schlatter who made a small theory about where the sweetness came from. Jim along with his lab partner named Harman Lowrie put the compound in black coffee of all drinks, 10 mL to be exact and noticed a change in taste. The coffee was not only sweeter but it was sweet with no other aftertaste, notably not nasty like the aftertaste of saccharin. Jim recorded his amazing findings in a lab notebook to keep record and data on the compound. He then went to his boss, Dr. Bob Mazur to notify him about his newfound discovery. Little did he know that his findings would lead to a
