The company that produced one of the most important vaccines of the twenty-first century began by selling sweets. In 1849, in a red-brick building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a young chemist from Württemberg and his confectioner cousin sold their first product: a worm cure disguised as candy. Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart had emigrated from Ludwigsburg, in the Kingdom of Württemberg, the year before, with a $2,500 loan from Pfizer’s father and a single clever idea.

The idea was santonin, an antiparasitic used to treat the intestinal worms that were endemic in mid-nineteenth-century America. Santonin worked, but it was bitter, and patients avoided it. Pfizer the chemist and Erhart the confectioner combined their trades, blending the drug with an almond-toffee flavouring and shaping it into a sugar cone. It was effective and it was palatable, and it sold. A pharmaceutical empire began as a sweetshop remedy for a parasite.

From Brooklyn chemist to wartime supplier

Pfizer did not stay in confectionery. The company moved into fine chemicals — iodine, camphor, boric acid, citric acid — the unglamorous industrial inputs that an importing nation suddenly needed to make for itself. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Charles Pfizer & Company supplied the Union Army with tartaric acid, cream of tartar, and iodine, used as painkillers, coolants, and disinfectants in a war where disease killed more soldiers than bullets. By the time Charles Pfizer died in 1906, his firm was one of the largest specialty-chemical companies in the United States.

The defining moment came two wars later. In the early 1940s, with penicillin newly understood but impossible to make in quantity, the American and British governments appealed to the largest U.S. chemical firms to find a way to mass-produce it. Of the companies that answered, Pfizer alone bet on fermentation — the same brewing-style process it had perfected decades earlier to make citric acid. Led by the chemist Jasper Kane, Pfizer developed deep-tank fermentation, bought a disused Brooklyn ice plant for its refrigeration, and converted it into a penicillin factory that opened on 1 March 1944.

D-Day and after

The timing mattered. By the Normandy landings of June 1944, enough penicillin was available to treat every wounded Allied soldier who needed it — a large share of it from that converted Brooklyn ice plant. The American Chemical Society later designated Pfizer’s deep-tank fermentation a National Historic Chemical Landmark, the engineering breakthrough that ushered in the age of antibiotics. A German immigrant’s candy company had become indispensable to the Allied war effort.

The arc did not stop there. The same fermentation expertise carried Pfizer into streptomycin, then into the blockbuster era of Lipitor and Viagra, and finally into 2020, when Pfizer partnered with the German biotechnology firm BioNTech to deliver one of the first authorised mRNA vaccines against COVID-19. A century and a half after a Württemberg chemist sweetened a worm cure in Brooklyn, his company was once again translating European science into American scale — and, with BioNTech, closing the transatlantic circle it had opened in 1849.

Sources

  1. Encyclopædia Britannica, "Pfizer Inc."
  2. Pfizer Inc., corporate history and "Celebrating 175 Years" (pfizer.com).
  3. R. A. Bauer, "Charles Pfizer," Immigrant Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies (German Historical Institute).
  4. American Chemical Society, "Penicillin Production through Deep-tank Fermentation," National Historic Chemical Landmark, 2008.

Produced by the Editorial Team · European Roots, American Greatness

Special Feature Series: Transatlantic Corporate Genealogies