Think of the biggest cities in the world: places like Tokyo, New York, or Shanghai, where millions of people are clump up together.
In the past, whenever a large population lived in a small area, you’d get horrible disease outbreaks.
Spanish flu, cholera, the Black Death; all those nasty diseases would keep the population small and divided.
Such problems are a thing of the past now thanks to modern medicine, and so in today’s post we’ll take a look at one of the big names in the pharmaceutical industry: Bayer.
Now Bayer is a very old company and it’s German.
It was established in 1863 by man named Friedrich Bayer, who made a living as a dye salesman.
Now at that point in history the chemical industry was still very young: only a few decades ago the Industrial Revolution had swept across Europe and created the booming textile industry.
The thing about making clothes, though, is that you need to dye them, and to do that, well, you need dyes.
Now, natural dyes were often very rare and expensive, and textile makers wanted a cheap replacement to go along with their mass production.
The answer to that problem was synthetic dyes, and that’s what our friend Friedrich Bayer was making.
Synthetic dyes had been around for less than ten years when he opened his factory.
They were discovered in 1856 by a man called William Perkin.
He was a college student at the Royal College of Chemistry in London, and at the time he was trying to synthesize quinine, a medication for treating malaria.
No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get the reaction right, but in one of his failed experiments he noticed a purple solution in one of his flasks.
This failure turned out to be a blessing, as he quickly discovered that this solution could permanently turn clothes purple.
Pretty soon he had a factory set up to mass-produce this purple dye, and that made him very rich.
Back in Germany, Friedrich Bayer and friends were essentially doing the same thing: mass producing dyes and turning a huge profit.
Business was good in these early days of little competition.
Bayer’s company grew from 3 employees in 1863 to over 300 in 1881.
The synthetic dye industry could not remain young forever though, and eventually new competitors started driving prices down.
Bayer response was to establish their own research department.
This was a huge gamble at the time.
Science and medicine as we know them today didn’t exist in the end of the 19th century: people didn’t know about acidity, radiation, electrons, even the nuclear model of the atom.
Hell, they had only discovered that washing your hands was hygienic less than 50 years prior.
Despite the sorry state of science though, Bayer’s research department managed to make a huge breakthrough when they discovered Aspirin in 1897.
The active ingredient of Aspirin had been discovered more than a century earlier, but ingesting it alone would cause you a nasty stomach ache, so it generally wasn’t used.
What the Bayer scientists managed to do was to make Aspirin less disruptive and more effective.
That made it an instant seller, and its kickstarted Bayer’s global expansion.
Another big hit they sold was heroin: yes, that heroin.
It too had been discovered several decades before, but Bayer managed to commercialize it as a, and I quote, “non-addictive cough suppressant.”
That’s right, they sold heroin as cough medicine.
It was a bit of an overkill, but you have to admit it was pretty effective.
It probably won’t come as a huge surprise that heroin ended up being extremely popular around the world.
Combined with Aspirin, Bayer’s international sales skyrocketed.
By 1913, they had subsidiaries in the UK, US, France, and Russia, and over 80% of their revenue was coming from exports.
They eventually stopped selling heroin, for obvious reasons, but that didn’t stop their massive international expansion.
Everything seems to be going great, and then this happens: Archduke Franz Ferdinand gets shot, Austria-Hungary invades Serbia, everyone contracts a bad case of nationalism, and you get World War 1.
In an instant, 80% of Bayer’s revenue was gone.
Their international subsidiaries were expropriated, and their assets ended up being sold off to competitors.
Back at home, they became integrated in Germany’s war economy.
That meant producing war materials for the Kaiser’s military: things like explosives and chemical weapons.
Things went bad for the Central Powers pretty fast, and Bayer didn’t fare any better.
The November Revolution came and went, but the Germany economy was still pretty much ruined.
The early 1920s saw one of the most spectacular cases of hyperinflation in modern history: the German mark’s value diminished from 48 marks per dollar at the end of WW1, to over 4.2 trillion marks per dollar in 1923.
Bayer was in deep financial trouble by that point, and so in 1925 they agreed to a massive merger with their German competitors.
The resulting conglomerate was called IG Farben, which is short for, oh God help me: Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft.
Just rolls off the tongue doesn’t it.
It was a bold, yet effective move by the Germans, and in a couple of years France and the UK would also consolidate their chemical industries.
With IG Farben, however, things start to get a little bit controversial.
Don’t get me wrong, they made immense contributions to all areas of chemistry.
Many of their researchers were awarded Nobel Prizes for their discoveries, but by the end of the 1920s a particular someone was already poking his head around the German political scene: After Hitler became the Fuhrer of Germany in 1934 he ordered the large-scale rearmament of the German military.
This turned out to be a very lucrative business opportunity for IG Farben, and they took it.
By the time Hitler became trigger happy and decided to invade Poland, IG Farben was one of Nazi Germany’s biggest government contractors.
This is where things start to get ugly.
Many concentration camps were set up to be strategically close to IG Farben’ factories.
They relied heavily on slave labor, especially towards the latter part of the war, and they even went as far as to build a synthetic rubber plant next to Auschwitz.
They also produced and held the patent for Zyklon B, the infamous insecticide that was used to gas people in extermination camps during the Holocaust.
They were involved in some truly messed up stuff, and I wouldn’t blame you if you need some eye bleach, so here’s an image of cute little puppies to make you feel better.
So, what happened after the war?
Well, things in the East were simple: Stalin came, saw, and nationalized, and that was the end of IG Farben’s Eastern assets.
Things in the West, however, were a bit more complicated.
As you know, many former Nazis were tried for war crimes at the Nuremberg trials.
IG Farben’s directors were also put on trial, but they managed to get off lightly compared to their friends from the military.
Of the 24 defendants who were indicted, only 13 were found guilty, and their sentences barely ranged from 1.5 to 8 years.
The Allies had initially decided to destroy IG Farben because of how morally corrupt it was, but as usual, the interests of major corporations got in the way of justice.
John Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, for example, had close ties to IG Farben, and the two firms had engaged in numerous cartel agreements.
I’ll refrain from getting into conspiracy theories, but it’s a fact that IG Farben continued their operations well after the fall of the Third Reich.
They were finally broken up into their constituent companies in 1952, which lead to Bayer’s reestablishment as an independent company.
Things weren’t looking good for the new Bayer: this was the second time in a row they had lost all of their foreign assets.
This time though they managed to buy up several of their smaller competitors that were also spun off from IG Farben.
In the end, Bayer’s strategy was pretty much the same: they would heavily invest in research and development, and they would constantly release new products to the market; not just medicine, but also pesticides and petrochemicals.
Over the next five decades, Bayer’s research division would make numerous advances in the fields of chemistry and medicine, far more than you’d like to know.
They ended up spinning off their petrochemical division in 2004, so now they just make pesticides and medicine.
Funnily enough, they coexisted with IG Farben up until 2012.
That’s right, it took German authorities sixty years to settle all the lawsuits from former factory slaves.
What they’ll do in the future will probably be the same as what they’re doing now: making the world a better place through innovations in medicine.
That’s about it for Bayer’s story.
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