History of Pfizer

Two cousins, Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhart, formed Pfizer in 1849 after they arrived in Brooklyn from Germany.

At first the venture was a small chemical manufacturer, but it achieved early success after developing a way to improve the palatability of a treatment for parasitic worms. After its discovery of Terramycin in 1950 Pfizer became a research-based pharmaceutical company.

Through the latter half of the 19th century citric acid - made from lemons, limes and oranges and used in soft drinks and cleaning fluids – became Pfizer’s central product.

For decades, citric acid was the company’s most popular product, but when the availability of the ingredients needed to make the product slowed during WWI, Pfizer was forced to find new supply sources. It did so after years of experimenting with fermentation, a process that eventually enabled Pfizer to produce penicillin on a large scale basis, as it did during WWII.

Pfizer’s first medicinal was a reformulation of santonin, an extract of Levant Wormseed, used as an anti-parasitic to treat intestinal worms.

Erhart, a confectioner, blended bitter-tasting santonin with almond-toffee flavoring, shaping it into a candy cone for palatabultiy and ’new santonin’ became a success for the company.

In 1998 the company launched Viagra, a novel erectile dysfunction drug that has become a $1 billion plus a year blockbuster and is often viewed as one of the most shrewdly marketed drugs of all time.

By 1999 it was among the world’s top producers of over-the-counter medicines and the leading producer of fish food and aquarium products.

In order to expand and strengthen its business, Pfizer has made numerous acquisitions, including Warner-Lambert in 2000, Pharmacia in 2003 and Wyeth in 2009.
History of Pfizer

Firmenich SA

Founded in 1895, Chuit & Naef was established in Switzerland by two brothers-in-law named Philippe Chuit, a talented Swiss chemist, and Martin Naef, a shrewd businessman.

They were joined shortly after by Fred Firmenich, who soon became majority partner. The company was renamed Firmenich SA. It remains a family owned company headquarter in Switzerland.

Firmenich’s business is divided into two main segments: flavors and perfumery. It ahs associated companies all over the world; the British company, Firmenich UK ltd, was set-up in 1949 and is based in Southall, Middlesex, while the US headquarters has been in Princeton since 1936.

Since 1895, Firmenich has built its business on innovative research. Leopold Ruzicka, professor at ETH-Zurich and Nobel Prize winner in 1939, was Firmenich’s first research director and a life-long consultant.
Firmenich SA

The Google Story

The Google Story
Google was founded by two Ph.D. computer science students at Stanford University in California – Larry Page and Sergey Brin. When Page and Brin began their hero’s journey, they didn’t know exactly where they were headed.

Larry Page was born in 1973 in Lansing. Both of his parents were computer scientists. His father was a university professor and a leader in the field of artificial intelligence, while his mother was a teacher of computer programming.

Meanwhile, Sergey Brin was also born in 1973, in Moscow, Russia, the son of a Russian mathematician and economist. His entire family fled the Soviet Union in 1979 under the threat of growing anti-Semitism and began their new lives as immigrants in the United States.

According to Brin, the research behind Google began in 1995. The first prototype was actually called BackRub. A couple of years later, they had a search engine that worked considerably better than the others available did at the time.

Within the next few years, the prototype system had been converted into progressively improved versions, and these were substantially more effective than any other search engine then available.

As the buzz about their project spread, more and more people began to use it. Soon they were reporting that there were 10,000 searches per day at on their system.

They named their successor search engine Google, in a whimsical analogy to the mathematical term googol, which is the immense large number 1 followed by 100 zeros.

Google Inc. opened its door as a business entity in September 1998, operating out of modest facilities in a Menlo Park, California garage.

Google was also in the process of developing a unique company culture. It operated in an informal atmosphere that facilitated both collegiality and an easy exchange of ideas.

By the end of 2000, Google was handling more than 100 million searches each day. Shortly thereafter, Google began to deliver new innovations and establish new partnerships to enter the burgeoning field of mobile wireless computer.

By expanding into this field, Google continued to pursue its strategy of putting search into hands of as many as possible.
The Google Story