By Brandon Huss
The next time you tear open a distinctively pink packet of Sweet Low, thank Constantin Fahlberg, who patented the world's first artificial sweetener-saccharin. Born in Russia, Fahlberg was living in Germany when he got the chance to go to America and work with the great Johns Hopkins University chemist Ira Remsen. As the story goes, in 1879, Remsen was having dinner with his wife after a hard day in the lab researching coal-tar derivatives.
He noticed the dinner rolls tasted oddly sweet, then bitter. His wife tasted nothing unusual, so Remsen deduced some substance from his lab was responsible. Another version credits Fahlberg's unhygienic habits-not washing his hands-that led to the discovery of benzoic sulphinide, which Fahlberg dubbed saccharin from the Latin for sugar, saccharum. In any case, the two men published a paper about their discovery, but Remsen-who went on to become the university's second president-didn't think much more about it.
Back home in Germany, however, Fahlberg scored financial backing and two patents for saccharin in 1895. Remsen was furious, declaring, Fahlberg is a scoundrel. It nauseates me to hear my name mentioned in the same breath with him. Their subsequent 1890s patent war helped bring public attention to saccharin, and Fahlberg got rich.
First marketed as an antiseptic and food preservative, saccharin found commercial success as a sweetener, boosted by WWI sugar shortages. Sweeten Low, introduced in 1957, took advantage of the fact that saccharin is 300 to 500 times as sweet sugar; it can be used in quantities so small as to effectively contain zero calories.
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