World War I and Bayer
By the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Bayer was facing competition in all its major markets from local ASA producers as well as other German drug firms (particularly Heyden and Hoechst). The British market was immediately closed to the German companies, but British manufacturing could not meet the demand—especially with phenol supplies, necessary for ASA synthesis, largely being used for explosives manufacture. On February 5, 1915, Bayer's UK trademarks were voided, so that any company could use the term aspirin. The Australian market was taken over by Aspro, after the makers of Nicholas-Aspirin lost a short-lived exclusive right to the aspirin name there. In the United States, Bayer was still under German control—though the war disrupted the links between the American Bayer plant and the German Bayer headquarters—but phenol shortage threatened to reduce aspirin production to a trickle, and imports across the Atlantic Ocean were blocked by the Royal Navy.
Read more about this topic: History Of Aspirin
Famous quotes containing the words world and/or war:
“Love was before the light began,
When light if over,love shall be”
—Unknown. The Thousand and One Nights.
AWP. Anthology of World Poetry, An. Mark Van Doren, ed. (Rev. and enl. Ed., 1936)
“There is the guilt all soldiers feel for having broken the taboo against killing, a guilt as old as war itself. Add to this the soldier’s sense of shame for having fought in actions that resulted, indirectly or directly, in the deaths of civilians. Then pile on top of that an attitude of social opprobrium, an attitude that made the fighting man feel personally morally responsible for the war, and you get your proverbial walking time bomb.”
—Philip Caputo (b. 1941)