Saccharin Discovery Followed Unwashed Hands

The first commercially viable artificial sweetener was saccharin, whose sweetness chemist Constantin Fahlberg accidentally discovered in the Johns Hopkins University laboratory in 1878. According to Fahlberg's later account, he went to dinner without washing his hands and found his bread "unspeakably sweet." Realizing that the sweetness came from something he had handled, he abandoned dinner, rushed back to the laboratory, and tasted every beaker and evaporating dish on his worktable until he found the compound. Luckily, none contained anything poisonous or corrosive. He published his discovery in 1879 and later patented and commercialized it.

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