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:
“Until the day when, your endurance gone, in this world for you without arms, you catch up in yours the first mangy cur you meet, carry it for the time needed for it to love it and you it, then throw it away.”
—Samuel Beckett (1906–1989)
“What war has always been is a puberty ceremony. It’s a very rough one, but you went away a boy and came back a man, maybe with an eye missing or whatever but godammit you were a man and people had to call you a man thereafter.”
—Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (b. 1922)