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But producing just what the doctor ordered takes more than miles of pipes and mountains of materials. It also takes the priceless catalysts of knowledge and character. Those ingredients are well compounded in the man who transformed Merck & Co. from a modest company making a conventional line of drugs and other chemicals into a flourishing medical pioneer. He is Merck's Chairman George Wilhelm Herman Emanuel Merck
("Named after all my uncles, who had to give me silver presents for ten years").
The Sign of the Angel. When Friedrich Jacob Merck took over a pharmacy called the Engelapotheke ("Angel Drugstore") in the Hessian town of Darmstadt 284 years ago, chemistry was just emerging from the shadows of alchemy. In 1827, the Merck firm started manufacturing; in the next 40 years it achieved the first commercial production of morphine, codeine and cocaine. By 1891 the company was selling so many of its products in North America that a son of the house, 24-year-old George Merck, was sent over to take a closer look at the market.
George Merck liked the country so much that he settled in Manhattan. He was quick to see the immense opportunities for technical industry in this new nation, growing up behind its protective-tariff walls. His U.S. partnership of Merck & Co. bought 150 acres at Rahway, NJ. In 1903 the plant began making much the same line of chemicals and medicinals as its parent firm was making on the other side of the tariff wall.
George Merck had already started the family which was to carry on the U.S. business. He settled with his wife (from a Darmstadt family) in Llewellyn Park, N.J., within a stone's throw of Thomas Alva Edison's home and laboratory. In 1894 his first child (of five) and only son, George, was born.
Young George Merck grew up in the pleasant country demesne of Llewellyn Park, spent his summers sailing in his father's naphtha launch on Lake Hopatcong, traveling abroad or around the U.S. In the Harvard class of 1915, Merck finished his B.A. work a year early, and planned to go to Germany for a doctorate in chemistry. World War I prevented that. His father said: "Come on into the shop. The war will be over in a few months and then you can go and get your degree." But as Merck says: "I never did, and I'm still in the shop."
In the postwar company, young George Merck moved rapidly up to the presidency (1925). His father, only 59, died a year later, and left his 32-year-old son on his own. And so, after a war-enforced severance from the Darmstadt firm, was the reorganized U.S. company.
The time had come for expansion. Merck & Co. concluded that the way for the U.S. drug industry to expand was through all-out research. It was a proud day for Merck in 1933 when the company's new and enlarged labs (part for pure research, part for applied) were dedicated. It was the right time for labs. Research chemists were already opening four new medical frontiers, and Merck has been among the first to cross all of them: