Pharmaceutical Industry

Essay

Philadelphia played a key role in the birth of the American pharmaceutical industry in the early nineteenth century, and the region remained a major pharmaceutical center into the early twenty-first century. Home since the colonial period to many of America’s leading scientific, educational, and medical institutions, Philadelphia was well-positioned to support the emergence of a pharmaceutical industry. The nation’s first drug mill was established in Philadelphia in the 1810s, and the city hosted a significant concentration of drug makers over the years, as well as related industries such as chemical manufacturing and supporting institutions such as research universities and hospitals.

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, doctors and pharmacists generally made their own medicines, grinding and mixing materials into powders and extracts themselves. Most medicines were imported from England, however, until the War of 1812 interrupted the supply and spurred domestic drug manufacturing. It was at this point that the American pharmaceutical industry began in earnest. Several Philadelphia pharmacists and chemists branched into small-scale drug manufacturing, and some of these evolved into wholesalers or larger manufacturers.

This black and white lithograph shows Charles Hagner's drug mills at East Falls. The central focus is a large factory building with a tall smokestack. A few people and carriages are visible on the adjacent streets.
In 1812, Charles Hagner (1796–1878) used his East Falls mill to grind pharmaceutical ingredients for a local druggist, accomplishing in a single day a process that would have taken months by the traditional mortar and pestle method. Hagner’s success allowed him to build larger mills in Northern Liberties, such as the one shown in this 1875 lithograph. (Historical Society of Pennsylvania)

Philadelphia’s first large-scale drug manufacturer was not a pharmacist or chemist, but mill owner Charles Hagner, who in 1812 used his water-powered mill in East Falls to grind several tons of cream of tartar into powder for a local druggist. Hagner’s milling process accomplished in one day what would have taken months by the traditional mortar and pestle method, a feat that generated great interest in the nation’s emerging drug industry. Hagner thereafter focused on grinding materials for medicines, establishing America’s first drug mill at his East Falls location. In 1820 he moved his business to Manayunk, and in 1839 he built a large steam-powered plant in Northern Liberties.

Dozens of Manufacturers Arise

The antebellum period saw the establishment of dozens of pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturers in Philadelphia, fostered by the city’s strong medical, scientific, and educational communities. Powers & Weightman, founded in 1818 by English immigrants, and Rosengarten & Sons, founded in 1822 by a German immigrant, became two of the world’s largest manufacturers of quinine in the nineteenth century. Advertising themselves as “manufacturing chemists,” the two companies made a wide variety of chemicals and medicines before merging in the early twentieth century. John Smith & Company, founded in 1830 by John Smith (d. 1845), and John Wyeth & Brother, founded in 1860 by brothers John (1834–1907) and Frank Wyeth (1836–1913), were two other drug companies established by pharmacists in antebellum Philadelphia. Both began as small-scale operations and grew into pharmaceutical giants. Following various mergers and acquisitions over the years, both remained active in the Philadelphia area in the early twenty-first century.

Robert Shoemaker (1817–96) was yet another early nineteenth-century Philadelphia pharmacist turned drug maker. Shoemaker took over a local pharmacy in 1837 and shortly thereafter began developing glycerin. In 1846 he became the nation’s first commercial manufacturer of the drug. In 1856 William Warner opened a drug store in Philadelphia, where he developed a process for coating medicine tablets with sugar to improve their taste. Warner later gave up his retail business to focus on manufacturing medicines. His company eventually became Warner-Lambert, a major national pharmaceutical firm.

This black and white drawing shows the exterior of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. A few 1920s-era cars are parked on the street and some people pass by on the sidewalk.
The Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, founded in 1821 and shown here in a 1922 drawing, was the nation’s first pharmacy school. Many leading pharmaceutical executives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries graduated from PCP, later renamed the University of the Sciences. (Library Company of Philadelphia)

Philadelphia’s status as America’s preeminent early drug manufacturing center was further enhanced by the founding in 1821 of the nation’s first pharmacy college, the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy (PCP), later renamed the University of the Sciences. In addition to training pharmacists, the college’s mission was to “invite a spirit of pharmaceutical investigation and research.” Many of the nation’s leading pharmaceutical executives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries graduated from PCP.

Philadelphia dominated the American pharmaceutical industry throughout the antebellum period. Forty Philadelphia firms accounted for approximately 30 percent of the total value of the medicines, drugs, and extracts produced in the United States in 1860. Many of these companies benefited significantly from supplying medicines for the Civil War effort and saw considerable growth in the postwar period. In 1872 Wyeth employee Henry Bower (1833–96) developed a rotary tablet machine that allowed for mass production of medicines with precise dosages. The machine greatly expanded Wyeth’s manufacturing capacity and won awards at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia.

Growth of McNeil and Mulford

Local pharmacists continued to branch into drug manufacturing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In 1879 Robert McNeil (1856–1933), a PCP graduate, became proprietor of a drug store in Kensington, from which his son established McNeil Laboratories. The company grew to be one of the region’s major drug makers. Pharmacist Henry Kendall Mulford (1866–1937), also a PCP grad, founded the H. K. Mulford Company in the 1880s from his drug store in downtown Philadelphia. Mulford later focused on making vaccines and in 1895 offered the first commercially available diphtheria antitoxin produced in America. The company built a large plant in Glenolden, Delaware County, which produced several types of vaccines.

This black and white photograph shows Albert C. Barnes on the deck of a boat. He wears a large winter coat, gloves and hat and leans against the railing. Two smaller boats can be seen in the background.
Albert C. Barnes (1872–1951), shown here in a 1900 photograph, founded the A. C. Barnes Company in 1908. His wealth allowed him to collect art and establish the Barnes Foundation. (Library of Congress)

Young chemist Albert Barnes (1872–1951) took a job at H. K. Mulford in 1898, but left the following year to form a partnership with another chemist to make a new antiseptic they developed. After the partnership dissolved in 1908, Barnes created the A. C. Barnes Company to manufacture the product. The company was very successful, and Barnes used the wealth he amassed to collect art and establish the world-renowned Barnes Collection.

Philadelphia was also a major center for the production of “patent medicines,” commercially available over-the-counter nostrums that were sold under brand names. Although their effectiveness was often dubious, patent medicines were marketed with colorful, exaggerated claims of their therapeutic qualities and were very popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Thomas Dyott (1771–1861), America’s first successful patent medicine manufacturer, made and sold a variety of elixirs and ointments in Philadelphia in the early nineteenth-century. In the 1810s he built a substantial glass works in Kensington to make bottles for his products. At the turn of the twentieth century, Philadelphia was home to two major patent medicine manufacturers, Dr. D. Jayne & Sons and Johnston, Holloway, & Company.

By 1909, there were 174 drug makers in Philadelphia, along with numerous chemical companies and several major research universities and hospitals. The concentration of these industries and institutions made the region a key center for pharmaceutical research and development throughout the twentieth century. In the early 1940s, West Chester, Pennsylvania, chemist G. Raymond Rettew (1903–73) developed a method for mass producing penicillin, based on his work with mushrooms (mushroom growing was a major industry in Chester County). Sponsored by Wyeth (then operating as American Home Products), Rettew’s Chester County Mushroom Laboratories in West Chester became the world’s leading producer of penicillin, which was put to immediate, extensive use during World War II.

Pharmacy College Influence Persists

Graduates of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy continued to play leading roles in the local pharmaceutical industry, particularly in family-run companies. At McNeil Laboratories, Robert McNeil, Jr. (1915–2010), grandson of the company founder, joined the firm after graduating from PCP in 1938. In the 1950s he oversaw development of the pain reliever Tylenol, a very successful medicine that became the company’s signature product. Similarly, at William H. Rorer, Inc., founded in 1910, Gerald F. Rorer (1908–76), son of the founder and a 1931 PCP graduate, took over the family-run drug company, based in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, and transformed it into a major pharmaceutical firm, largely on the strength of its popular antacid, Maalox.

This color advertisement shows the full campus of the Powers-Weightman-Rosengarten Company at Schuylkill Falls. Many lage factory buildings with smokestacks are visible. The image also includes small close-ups of the Tartaric and Citric Acid Department and the Laboratory for Fine Chemicals.
Powers & Weightman Co. (est. 1818) was the first company to manufacture quinine, an antimalarial drug, in the United States. The company merged with Rosengarten & Sons in 1905 to form Powers-Weightman-Rosengarten, shown here in an advertisement from the same year. (Library Company of Philadelphia)

Mergers and acquisitions, common in the pharmaceutical industry from its earliest years, continued over the course of the twentieth century. Powers-Weightman-Rosengarten, formed through the merger of two Philadelphia pharmaceutical giants in 1905, consolidated with Merck & Company in 1927 and moved to northern New Jersey. H. K. Mulford merged with Sharp & Dohme in 1929, which in 1953 was also acquired by Merck & Company. John Smith & Company became Smith, Kline, & French in 1929, and in 2001 merged with English drug maker Glaxo to form GlaxoSmithKline. French multinational firm Rhone-Poulenc acquired Rorer in 1990. Wyeth was acquired in 1932 by American Home Products, parent company to a number of pharmaceutical, home care, and food product manufacturers. American Home Products later divested itself of its non-pharmaceutical companies to focus specifically on drug making and in 2002 adopted the Wyeth name for the entire company. In 2009 Wyeth was acquired by Pfizer, a multinational pharmaceutical company with headquarters in New York City. Nine years earlier, Pfizer had acquired Warner-Lambert.

Increased consolidation among drug makers in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries gave rise to “Big Pharma,” a select group of very large multinational pharmaceutical firms that dominated the industry. The Philadelphia area was home to several of these pharmaceutical giants. Some had originally been founded in the city and remained in the region; others moved to the area later in their development. Of the former, the only company still located within the city itself was GlaxoSmithKline, which in 2013 moved one of its two North American headquarters from Center City to the Navy Yard in South Philadelphia. Both Wyeth and McNeil remained in the area but moved to the suburbs, McNeil to Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, in 1961 after being acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 1959, and Wyeth to various suburban locations before consolidating in Collegeville, Pennsylvania, in 2003.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, Philadelphia stood at the center of a mid-Atlantic pharmaceutical corridor stretching from Delaware to northern New Jersey that included many of the world’s Big Pharma companies. In addition to GlaxoSmithKline, Wyeth, and McNeil, the Philadelphia region was home to Endo Pharmaceuticals in Malvern, Pennsylvania, originally established in 1920, later acquired by DuPont, and spun off as a separate company in 1997; AstraZeneca in Wilmington, Delaware, established in 1999 through a merger of two large English and Swedish pharmaceutical companies; and Teva, an Israeli generic drug maker that established a North American headquarters in Montgomeryville, Pennsylvania, in the early 2000s. Numerous other pharmaceutical companies, large and small, were based in the broader Philadelphia metropolitan area in the early twenty-first century as well. They ranged from traditional drug makers to biotechnology firms to research and development companies, all part of the expansive “Life Sciences” sector that comprised a major part of the regional economy. A 2016 report commissioned by a consortium of local business and industry organizations noted that the sector encompassed 1,200 life sciences companies across the region, employed 48,900 workers, and was responsible for $24.6 billion in output.

From its key role in the creation of the American pharmaceutical industry in the early nineteenth century to its position as home to a number of major drug companies in the early twenty-first, the greater Philadelphia region was an important pharmaceutical center for over two hundred years.

Jack McCarthy is an archivist and historian who specializes in three areas of Philadelphia history: music, business and industry, and Northeast Philadelphia. He regularly writes, lectures, and gives tours on these subjects. His book In the Cradle of Industry and Liberty: A History of Manufacturing in Philadelphia was published in 2016 and he curated the 2017–18 exhibit Risk & Reward: Entrepreneurship and the Making of Philadelphia for the Abraham Lincoln Foundation of the Union League of Philadelphia. He serves as consulting archivist for the Philadelphia Orchestra and Mann Music Center and from 2011–16 directed a major archival project for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania focusing on the collections of the region’s many small historical repositories.

Copyright 2018, Rutgers University

Gallery

Albert C. Barnes

Library of Congress

Albert C. Barnes (1872–1951) grew up in South Philadelphia and graduated from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine in 1892. After studying advanced chemistry in Germany from 1894 to 1895, Barnes returned to Philadelphia, eventually taking a job at the H. K. Mulford pharmaceutical company in 1898.

Barnes left Mulford the following year to manufacture Argyrol, a silver-based antiseptic, with his business partner Hermann Hille (1871–1962). This 1900 photograph was taken around the same time as the product launch. Barnes bought out Hille in 1907 and founded the A. C. Barnes Company in 1908. Over the next two decades, Barnes amassed his fortune and began collecting paintings, many of which remain on view at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia.

Barnes sold his company for a significant profit in 1929 and continued collecting art until his death in 1951.

Philadelphia College of Pharmacy

Library Company of Philadelphia

By the early nineteenth century, Philadelphia had emerged as the preeminent drug manufacturing center in the United States. The 1821 founding of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy further cemented this status.

Several well-known pharmaceutical leaders graduated from PCP, including William R. Warner (1836–1901), John Wyeth (1834–1907), and Robert L. McNeil (1915–2010). William Procter Jr. (1817–1874), one of the co-founders of the American Pharmaceutical Association, served as a faculty member for three decades beginning in 1846.

The college became coeducational in 1876 and later introduced curricula in three additional areas alongside pharmacy: bacteriology, biology, and chemistry. PCP, shown here in a 1922 drawing, was renamed the University of the Sciences in 1998.

Hagner's Drug Mills

Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Philadelphia’s first large-scale drug manufacturer was not a pharmacist or chemist, but mill owner Charles Hagner (1796–1878). In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, doctors and pharmacists made drugs using the traditional mortar and pestle method. In 1812, Hagner used his water-powered mill in East Falls to grind several tons of cream of tartar into powder for a local druggist, completing in one day a process that would have taken months by the traditional method.

Hagner’s innovation spurred Philadelphia’s emerging drug industry. In the ensuing years, Hagner focused on pharmaceutical production, establishing the first drug mill in the United States at his East Falls location. He moved to Manayunk in 1820 and built a large steam-powered plant in Northern Liberties in 1839. This 1875 lithograph shows one of his mills at Pegg and New Market Streets.

Powers-Weightman-Rosengarten Company

Library Company of Philadelphia

The antebellum period saw the establishment of dozens of pharmaceutical and chemical manufacturers in Philadelphia. Powers & Weightman (est. 1818) and Rosengarten & Sons (est. 1822) became two of the world’s largest manufacturers of quinine, an antimalarial drug.

Both companies made a variety of chemicals and medicines throughout the nineteenth century, and ultimately merged in 1905. This advertisement, produced the same year as the merger, depicts the extensive campus of Powers-Weightman-Rosengarten in East Falls.

Quinine Poster – U.S. Public Health Service

Library of Congress

Quinine, a drug made from cinchona plants, was a common malaria treatment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Quinine removes malarial parasites from red blood cells and quickly alleviates symptoms of the disease, though malaria can persist in other cells and cause relapse.

Research during World War II led to the discovery of more effective antimalarial drugs, such as chloroquine and primaquine. However, quinine aided many sufferers in the years of its primary use. Several Philadelphia manufacturers, including Powers & Weightman and Rosengarten & Sons, produced quinine for decades. This 1920 poster, released by the U.S. Public Health Service, advertises the benefits of the drug.

Related Topics

Themes

Time Periods

Locations

Essays

Related Reading

England, Joseph W., ed. The First Century of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, 1821–1921. Philadelphia: Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science, 1922.

Liebenau, Jonathan. Medical Science and Medical Industry: The Formation of the American Pharmaceutical Industry. London: Macmillan Press, 1987.

Macfarlane, John James.  Manufacturing in Philadelphia, 1682–1912. Philadelphia: Philadelphia Commercial Museum, 1912.

Zebroski, Bob. A Brief History of Pharmacy: Humanities Search for Wellness. New York: Routledge, 2016.

Related Collections

Philadelphia Drug Exchange Records, 1861–1957. Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1300 Locust Street, Philadelphia.

Related Places

Astra-Zeneca/MedImmune manufacturing facility, 3001 Red Lion Road, Philadelphia.

Endo headquarters, 1400 Atwater Drive, Malvern, Pa.

GlaxoSmithKline headquarters, Philadelphia Navy Yard, 5 Crescent Drive, Philadelphia.

McNeil Consumer Healthcare headquarters, 7050 Camp Hill Road, Fort Washington, Pa.

Rorer and Wyeth headquarters at Pfizer campus, 500 Arcola Road, Collegeville, Pa.

Teva headquarters, 1090 Horsham Road, North Wales, Pa.

University of the Sciences, 600 S. Forty-Third Street, Philadelphia.

Links

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