Company
ActiveBayer
Leverkusen · Since 1863
Folded into IG Farben in 1925 and re-established after that combine was broken up. Bayer is an independent company again.
Friedrich Bayer and Johann Friedrich Weskott founded a dye company in Barmen in 1863. Synthetic dyes were the first products of a chemical industry that needed chemists on the payroll, not only in a university.
Bayer moved from color to medicine. It commercialized aspirin in 1899, after Felix Hoffmann and colleagues at the firm worked on acetylsalicylic acid. A pill a person could buy, made by a company that employed scientists, is a different object from a dye.
The industrial laboratory
By the 1880s Bayer's staff included academic chemists with a budget and a notebook. The job of industrial researcher, paid to find the next product rather than to teach, is one of the occupations this firm helped make normal. Alongside them were process workers in the dye sheds, salesmen who understood a formula, and patent clerks. The factory and the laboratory were one employer.
IG Farben, then Bayer again
In 1925 Bayer merged into IG Farben, the combine that later manufactured Zyklon B and used slave labor at Auschwitz. The postwar breakup reconstituted Bayer as a separate company in 1951. It is now based in Leverkusen, still a pharmaceutical and agricultural chemical firm, and still an independent employer. The catalogue marks it active, and the history includes the years the name was inside a combine that stood trial at Nuremberg.
The work it organized
- Industrial chemist
- Dye worker
- Patent clerk
- Detail man
On the timeline
Related
- BASFActive