Sweet as Saccharin Old German saccharin sachets. Image courtesy
Wikimedia Commons. They seem indispensable now, those small
paper packets found in restaurants around the world. These
ubiquitous artificial sweeteners—the blue Equal, the yellow
Splenda, and the pink Sweet’N Low—owe their existence to
chemistry. We may not think of them as single-serving chemicals,
but artificial sweeteners came out of chemistry labs over a
century ago. The great-grandfather of them all, the former king,
is benzoic sulphinide, commonly known as saccharin. Saccharin
emerged from a Johns Hopkins chemistry lab managed by Ira
Remsen. In 1877 Remsen had opened his lab to Constantin
Fahlberg, a Russian chemist who had come to Baltimore to offer
scientific testimony in a court case. Welcomed by Remsen and his
fellow researchers, Fahlberg took up their study of coal-tar
derivatives. One day in June 1878, after working in the lab,
Fahlberg sat down to dinner and made a remarkable discovery.
“Before going home for the evening I had washed