It’s been a while since my last post—I’ve been deep in a major editing pass on Roseleigh, which has kept me away from the blog. I’m excited to be back with aspirin—a topic I stumbled into during my research and couldn’t let go of.
Every time you take an aspirin, you’re part of a story that spans thousands of years and crosses empires. This unassuming pill’s path wends past ancient royal dye vats, nineteenth-century industrial chemistry, and wartime espionage—a pursuit of brighter blues and purples that accidentally led to the world’s first blockbuster drug, and, a mere eleven days later, to heroin.
The Colors of Kings
Blues and purples are rare compounds in nature. For most of history, humans knew of only a handful of sources: three marine rock snails of the Muricidae family and several species of the Indigofera plant genus. The most famous of these was Tyrian purple, worth more than its weight in gold. Dyers would use thousands of sea snails for a single robe. This rarity, combined with the difficulty of production, cemented their status as royal and sacred colors since antiquity. Dyestuffs in these shades have been immensely valuable commodities the world over for nearly three millennia.
An Explosion of Color
In 1834, Friedlieb Runge became the first person to discover “coal tar dye.” He began with creosote, a greasy industrial waste product from coal tar. Runge found that he could use this to create a brilliant synthetic blue. By chance, the synthetic blue he created was chemically identical to a compound derived from the destructive distillation of natural indigo.
He named this aniline—after an indigo-yielding plant, anil (Indigofera suffruticosa). His discovery led to an explosion of synthetic dyestuffs production in the late 1800s. Sir William Henry Perkin discovered mauveine in 1856—the first synthetic purple—while trying to synthesize quinine. That same year, Jakub Natanson derived fuchsine—the first synthetic magenta—from an aniline reaction.
In the following years, commercial production of fuschine and aniline would become huge business for dyestuff factories across Europe. Master dyer Johann Friedrich Weskott and dye salesman Friedrich Bayer founded one such factory in Barmen, Germany. But the burgeoning chemical industry, founded by men like Bayer, was discovering more than just new colors. Hidden within the waste products of their dye synthesis were compounds with unexpected and powerful effects on the human body.
Aspirin: An Accidental Cure
In 1852, French chemist Charles Gerhardt first synthesized acetic anhydride, a convenient chemical for performing acetylation reactions in commercial settings. Through acetylation—esterifying alcohols with acetyl groups—chemists can dramatically alter the properties of organic molecules. For instance, chemists found the first pain-relieving and fever-reducing aniline derivative in acetanilide, an acetylated form of the chemical. However, once doctors discovered acetanilide’s unacceptable toxicity, phenacetin—one of Bayer’s first medications—swiftly replaced it. Phenacetin is the acetylated form of p-nitrophenol, a useless by-product of the manufacture of blue dyestuffs.
However, the real breakthrough came in the summer of 1897. German chemist and Bayer employee Felix Hoffmann was trying to find a remedy that wouldn’t upset his father’s stomach. While healers had used salicylate-rich plant products like willow bark to fight aches and fevers since antiquity, Hoffmann successfully acetylated salicylic acid. In so doing, he created Bayer’s most commercially successful pharmaceutical of all time: aspirin.
The new pill was a commercial phenomenon, quickly becoming a staple in medicine cabinets around the world. The new pill instantly captured the public imagination, cementing its reputation as a “wonder drug.” I wove this very phenomenon into my historical novel, Roseleigh, as Donnacha recovers from his injuries at the wealthy Fitzwilliams’ home:
It’s my ribs that ache. Miss Fitzwilliam’s family has a big store of Bayer Aspirin—big stores of a lot of things, actually. She gives me tablets and the pain fades soon after. It’s true what they say, “It’s a wonder drug.”
Hoffmann synthesized more than just aspirin that fateful summer. Only eleven days after acetylating salicylic acid, he used the same process on morphine, creating diacetylmorphine. The new compound suppressed coughs with extraordinary effectiveness and produced a sensation that early test subjects described as feeling heroic. Believing it to be a non-addictive cure for both coughs and morphine addiction, Bayer marketed it under another powerful brand name: Heroin. It would take decades for the world to discover otherwise.
Aspirin Goes to War
Phenol is a key precursor in the synthesis of salicylic acid—aspirin’s core ingredient. It’s also used in the manufacture of trinitrophenol, a powerful high explosive. In 1914, at the beginning of the First World War, Britain redirected nearly all of its phenol production to munitions, and the Royal Naval blockade cut off Germany’s imports entirely. The production cost of Bayer Aspirin spiked sharply.
In 1915, German agents operating in the United States devised a scheme to solve this shortage. Hugo Schweitzer, a former Bayer employee, brokered a deal through a front company—the Chemical Exchange Association—to purchase Thomas Edison’s excess American phenol production. The conspirators then funneled the phenol to a German chemical subsidiary, which supplied the salicylic acid to Bayer.
The plot finally unraveled when a Secret Service agent recovered a briefcase left on a New York elevated train by German official Heinrich Albert. Inside lay a trove of incriminating documents. But by then, the conspirators had already diverted enough phenol to keep the Bayer factory running—a haul worth over $2 million at the time, or roughly $44.7 million today. By one German estimate, the same quantity could have produced 4.5 million pounds of Allied explosives.
The exposure badly damaged Bayer’s American reputation—ironic timing, as the company had been planning a major branding campaign to cement the aspirin-Bayer connection in the public mind.
Conclusion
From the waste vats of luxury dye works to the shelves of every pharmacy, aspirin’s story shows how medical breakthroughs often spring from the strangest soil. A useless by-product of blue dye synthesis became one of the first pain relievers. The same acetylation process that created a wonder drug created heroin eleven days later. And the pill’s key ingredient was valuable enough to fuel an international espionage plot.
When Donnacha reaches for those Bayer tablets in the Fitzwilliam household, he is reaching into a supply chain that runs through coal tar, synthetic dyes, a German chemist’s concern for his father’s stomach, and a world war. He doesn’t know any of that. He just knows the pain fades. That is perhaps the most telling detail in aspirin’s long history—how ordinary it became, and how extraordinary the path was that made it so.
What’s the most surprising origin story you’ve encountered for an everyday product? And have you come across aspirin or Bayer in your own historical reading? Let me know in the comments.
If you’d like to find out more about how I’ve woven the world of early twentieth-century medicine and industry into my novel, Roseleigh, please join my mailing list.
Notes and References
“Tyrian Purple”, The Origins of Color (Exhibition), University of Chicago Library (website).
Joe Schwarcz, PhD, “From Black Goo to Blue Dye and Beyond—the Fascinating History of Aniline,” McGill University’s Office for Science and Society (website), August 2, 2024.
“Felix Hoffmann” (Scientific Biography), Science History Institute.
Heribert von Feilitzsch, “Dr. Hugo Schweitzer and the Great Phenol Plot”, Mexican Revolution and World War I Blog, June 7, 2015.
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