In almost every restaurant that you go to, at least here in the US, you’ll likely find a small container holding a variety of brightly colored packets. You instantly realize that these are your sweeteners; they are even color-coded for your convenience.
ist image Freedom of choice among sweeteners
Today we’ll be talking about the pink packet, the saccharin. More often than not, this is in the form of the Sweet’N Low brand. This stuff seems to have been around forever. It’s actually been about 130 years.
Saccharin was discovered in 1878 in the Johns Hopkins University laboratory of Ira Remsen, a professor of chemistry. A Russian chemist named Constantin Fahlberg shared a lab with Remsen. Fahlberg was studying sugar. He did things like inspecting impounded sugar imports for purity issues.
One evening, after a long day of work, Fahlberg sat down to dinner with his family. He picked up a roll with his hand, and after he bit into it, he discovered that it had a remarkably sweet crust.
The bread wasn’t supposed to be sweet, so the scientist that he was, began to try to discover why. He recalled that he had spilled an experimental compound all over his hands earlier in the day. He brought his tongue to his fingers, and the rest was history.
He immediately returned to the lab and began taste testing various surfaces on his work table. Odd, I know. Eventually, he found the source of the sweetness, an overboiled beaker in which o-sulfobenzoic acid had reacted with phosphorus chloride and ammonia, producing benzoic sulfinide. Benzoic sulfinide is better known today as saccharin.
Though Falhberg had previously synthesized the compound by another method, he had no reason to taste the result. Serendipity had provided him with the first commercially viable alternative to cane sugar.
2nd image Early saccharin tablets from a time when German was still written with the German alphabet