Pure Prune and Brilliant Dolphin Blue

One can easily understand the frustration and pain felt by chemist Alfred Kern. For years he had worked for the Basel dye manufacturer Bindschedler & Busch, delivering groundbreaking innovations and paving the way for the industrial production of important and later extremely successful synthetic pigments. The rejection he experienced from company patriarch Robert Bindschedler therefore hurt deeply. In a letter written in 1887, around three years after leaving the company, Kern still wrote bitterly: “... because at the B&B factory I received no encouragement whatsoever from Bindschedler; on the contrary, he only expressed dismissive judgments about my work.” Yet his anger and disappointment would soon propel him to new heights and quickly make him forget his time at Bindschedler & Busch.

Alfred Kern.

Born in 1850 in Bülach in the canton of Zurich, Kern studied chemistry at the Polytechnic in Zurich and shortly after graduation joined the Oehler Works in Offenbach, an up-and-coming aniline factory. At around the age of 28, however, he moved to Basel to work for Bindschedler & Busch, one of many dye companies that had settled along the Rhine. All of them wanted to participate in the industrial gold rush that had swept through Europe after 1856, when the English chemist William Perkin accidentally discovered the synthetic production of dyes from aniline. Within a very short time, factories sprang up across the continent to manufacture these novel, highly attractive and relatively inexpensive dyes, which quickly became enormously popular compared to natural pigments. A chemical color frenzy It was the birth of industrial chemistry. The dye industry not only generated enormous capital but also attracted increasing numbers of talented scientists eager to push research and development forward – not unlike today’s pharmaceutical research boom or Silicon Valley in the United States, albeit on a different scale. One of these young pioneers was Alfred Kern. At Bindschedler & Busch he distinguished himself primarily through the development of an industrial process for manufacturing phosgene, which became important in dye production. At the same time, he succeeded in developing Crystal Violet and Auramine, two highly successful dye products. Auramine, when mixed with blue pigments, could produce a wide range of yellow, orange, and red tones.

Courtesy of Novartis Heritage & Company Archives.

Samples of CIBA-Geigy Dyes, 1970’s.

Courtesy of Novartis Heritage & Company Archives.

Yet Kern was unable to profit financially from these achievements. Although the process developed together with BASF brought him fame among the young scientific community, it did not translate into personal financial gain. In 1892 he wrote in his diary: “... that I subsequently found myself forced to leave my position at B&B, which business was then transformed into a joint-stock company, and thereby had to leave my finest inventions entirely in the hands of others.” His frustration with Bindschedler & Busch – which would soon be renamed CIBA – quickly faded once he decided to establish his own company. He soon found a partner in Edouard Sandoz, a company secretary, and together they decided to found a business and settle in Basel’s St. Johann district.

Edouard Constant Sandoz.

Sandoz and Kern It was not the undeveloped 11,000 square meters of greenfield land that convinced them to move to St. Johann, where Novartis now has its global headquarters. More important was the permission granted by the city of Basel to dispose of the waste generated by dye production quickly and free of charge into the Rhine. According to a report by cantonal chemist Carl Bulacher, the factory site “lies far away from a traffic road and therefore will not hinder housing or the expansion of the city.” Bulacher also noted that the Rhine was “still the best disposer of liquid and solid waste.” Other companies had already taken advantage of this relaxed approach to waste disposal. The Gebrüder Bloch leather company, the chemical factory Durand & Huguenin, and the municipal gasworks were already located in St. Johann. Industrial activity had also been booming on the opposite side of the Rhine since the mid-nineteenth century. Despite Kern’s early successes, the company’s beginnings were modest. At the founding of the partnership, the business initially consisted of an office building with an attached laboratory, three connected shed-style production halls, and a boiler house with a steam engine. “Colossal and pyramidal” Only a few years later, however, the company truly took off.

At first there were difficulties in producing Alizarin Blue: One production vessel exploded, and the dye could only be introduced two years later. Yet Kern soon patented a first product called Pure Prune. In 1889, Brilliant Dolphin Blue followed, significantly boosting sales. Thanks to this early wave of innovation, the Chemical Factory Kern & Sandoz, unlike most early Basel chemical companies, soon experienced dynamic growth. “Colossal, unprecedented, fabulous, pyramidal,” Edouard Sandoz wrote three years after the company’s founding in reference to the rapid increase in sales. Kern continued working with great success. Following the first phosgene dyes came azo dyes. Within a short period, he and his small team of fewer than a dozen chemists developed a whole series of new colors, including Plum Blue that proved highly successful on the market. In just a few years, the company developed more than twenty new dyes.

Already in 1888 the first buildings had to be expanded. Three years later, an additional production building was constructed, while the laboratories were enlarged as well. A metal workshop, carpentry shop and cooperage were added, since dyes were manufactured in wooden vats and filled into wooden barrels. In 1891 a workers’ residence was built because the company already employed ninety workers. Sandoz & Kern also operated a workers’ cafeteria, although meals were relatively expensive. Lunch cost 45 centimes, about one-third of a worker’s daily wage. Kern was overjoyed. On December 20, 1892, he wrote in his diary: “I left B&B in 1885, and in July of the same year I decided together with Mr. Sandoz to build a factory. It began operations in July 1886, and since then we have achieved such fortunate progress that I am now grateful to fate for what befell me in 1884. Sunshine follows rain and vice versa. Many things will still turn out differently.” And indeed, circumstances soon changed again.

Only a few months after this diary entry, Kern died from heart disease at the age of just 42. Shortly afterward, Edouard Sandoz also had to withdraw from the company due to health reasons. The business later became a joint-stock company and from 1936 to 1996 operated under the name Sandoz. Although illness and death forced the founders out only a few years after the company’s creation, the foundation they had built proved remarkably strong. The dyes developed by Kern and marketed by Sandoz created the capital base for the company’s continuous expansion. For many years, dyes remained the company’s primary business. The two founders also showed remarkable talent in recruiting people. Shortly after their departure, Sandoz succeeded in attracting Robert Gnehm, an important academic and businessman who would decisively shape the company’s future by steering it increasingly toward pharmaceuticals and recruiting key scientific talent.

Robert Gnehm.

Take-off at the St. Johann site Meanwhile, the dye business continued booming and the St. Johann site took on increasingly concrete forms. Ten years after the company’s founding, the area had grown to more than 63,000 square meters. But it was far from beautiful. According to eyewitness accounts, the unpaved factory roads were dusty in dry weather and almost impassable when it rained: “The many wagons delivering ice, coal, and other loads every day turned the roads into mud. Without wooden clogs one could hardly get through, and almost everyone connected with the factory wore wooden shoes all year round.” The First World War changed this situation dramatically. With the disappearance of the dominant German competition, Basel’s chemical companies suddenly became the most important suppliers of dyes to the British textile industry, the market leader of the era. Business boomed. While sales of the “Chemische Fabrik vormals Sandoz,” as the company was then called, amounted to 6 million Swiss francs in 1914, revenues surged to 29.5 million francs by 1916 and reached 37 million francs in 1918. Sandoz thus became one of Switzerland’s most successful companies.

The strong business performance triggered profound modernization at the St. Johann site during the First World War, continuing throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. The old shed buildings gave way to multi-story production facilities in which vertical production methods were used for the first time. From dyes to pharmaceuticals While dye production continued at full speed, the company also began exploring pharmaceuticals at an early stage. Initially limited to imitation products, Sandoz decided during the First World War to establish its own pharmaceutical research department. On the advice of Robert Gnehm, the company hired ETH scientist Arthur Stoll, who succeeded after only a few years in developing the company’s first medicine. Extracted from ergot fungus, Gynergen® became the first in a series of important products that allowed the company to establish itself in the pharmaceutical market and open a completely new chapter in its history.