A Sweet Discovery
- Dennis L. Peterson
- Feb 27
- 3 min read
The name Constantin Fahlberg is by no means a household name any more. But it ought to be.
Fahlberg was born in Tambov in central Russia in 1850. He developed an early interest in chemistry and later moved to the United States, where he got a job as a chemist at Johns Hopkins University doing chemical research.
One evening in 1878, while in his lab doing research, he got so involved in it that he suddenly realized that he was late for supper. He rushed from the lab to his dining table, where supper was already awaiting his arrival, without washing his hands. He took a drink of water and then broke off a piece of bread and popped it into his mouth.
He was immediately surprised by how sweet it tasted. He thought it must be a new recipe that had been used. He swallowed the sweet bread and took another drink of water, sipping from the spot on the rim of the glass where he had just touched it when he took his first sip. He again was surprised by a sweet, almost syrupy, taste.
He then licked his thumb and had a "light-bulb moment."
He rushed from the table back to his lab, where he worked for weeks to determine the chemical composition of the sweet substance that he had brought from the lab to the table. He had been analyzing coal tar at the time, and he came to realize that the sweet taste was caused by the benzoic sulfimide that he had been analyzing that day. He named the compound "saccharin."
Fahlberg published several articles about his discovery as he continued doing research on it. He eventually figured out how to produce it in quantities and got patents for his methods. He built a factory for the purpose in Germany (because costs were too high in America) and began to sell it to the public. Initially, it sold for $10-12 a pound, but over time the price fell. Nonetheless, Fahlberg grew wealthy from his discovery.
Saccharine didn't become widely popular, however, until the sugar shortages that resulted during World War I. When it came to the United States, the Food and Drug Administration began to get involved, analyzing it for themselves. Harvey Wiley of the FDA rushed to President Theodore Roosevelt in alarm to tell him of his conclusions. He described it to TR as "an illegal substitution of a valuable ingredient by a less valuable ingredient." It was, he told the president, "totally devoid of food value and extremely injurious to health." He demanded a ban of saccharin.
Unknown to Wiley, TR was an avid consumer of saccharin, and the president told him he was an idiot. He wouldn't approve any ban of the sweetener.
Undeterred, in 1977 the FDA again pushed for a ban based on results of a study that showed that saccharin had caused bladder cancer in lab rats. Again they failed to win an outright ban of the sweetener. They did, however, convince the government to order that a warning be printed on the product packaging. That requirement was lifted in 2000, however, when further research concluded that the human body reacts to saccharin differently than do rats' bodies.
Other artificial sweeteners now exist, of course, such as Equal, Nutrasweet, Splenda, and Stevia. But Fahlberg's saccharin was the first.
Mother (in the photo below) was a connoisseur of tea. She was never far from her cup of hot tea in cool weather or her glass of iced tea in warm weather. She was also conscious of her weight (unnecessarily so because she was always thin and petite), and she regularly used saccharin tablets as her sweetener of choice.
Whatever Mother made, the rest of the family drank, too, so I got my fair share of saccharin. During the scare that it might cause cancer and people returned to sugar as the preferred sweetener, the tea I drank never was sweet enough for my taste, no matter how much sugar I added.
Today, what was once a trade name is now a generically used term that means "excessively sweet."
My wife's Aunt Florence was also a user of much saccharin. She recently turned 100 and is counting.
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