Constantin Fahlberg

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Constantin Fahlberg (born December 22, 1850, in Tambov, Russia; died August 15, 1910, in Nassau, Germany) is most known for, along with Ira Remsen, discovering the artificial sweetener, saccharin, in 1879 while he was a postdoctoral researcher in Remsen's laboratory at Johns Hopkins University.

[edit] Saccharin

While Ira Remsen was eating rolls at dinner after a long day in the lab researching coal tar derivatives, he noticed that the rolls tasted initially sweet, but then bitter. Since his wife tasted nothing strange about the rolls, Remsen tasted his fingers and noticed that the bitter taste was probably from one the chemicals in his lab. The next day at his lab tasted the chemicals that he had been working with the previous day and discovered that it was the oxidation of o-toluenesulfonamide he had tasted the previous evening. He named the substance saccharin and he and his research partner Constantine Fahlberg published their finding in 1880. Later Remsen became angry after Fahlberg patented saccharin, claiming that he had discovered saccharin.^[1]