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Talk about bringing your work home with you! Russian chemist Constantin Fahlberg was experimenting with coal tar derivatives at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore Maryland when he landed his big, unexpected break.

Sitting down to dinner one evening after a busy day in the lab, he broke a piece of bread and took a bite. The bread tasted unusually sweet, he thought. As did the napkin, which he then used to wipe his moustache, and anything else he happened to touch. Sticking his thumb in his mouth, Fahlberg realised he was onto something and rushed back to the lab.

Here – and don’t try this one at home, kids – Fahlberg tasted every vial, dish and beaker he’d been using that day until he came across one filled with a combination of sulfobenzoic acid, phosphorus chloride and ammonia. Makes your mouth water doesn’t it!

Around 300 times sweeter than sucrose or your common or garden table sugar, but with no caloric or nutritional value, saccharin didn’t enjoy widespread commercial success until sugar shortages during World War I. Today, anhydroorthosulphaminebenzoic acid or saccharin for short is used in everything from baked goods and jams to salad dressings, toothpaste and vitamins. And to think, if he’d been a little more hygienic, Fahlberg might have washed his hands of saccharin and its associated fortune entirely.

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