The Inexorable Rise Of Synthetic Flavor: A Pictorial History

Monday, November 23, 2015 - 15:00 in Physics & Chemistry

1851 Crystal Palace Artificial flavors first enter the historical record in 1851, at the Crystal Palace exhibition in London, that great Victorian anthology of the world's technologies, treasures, and bric-a-brac. Visitors tarrying at the stalls of perfumers from Paris, Leipzig, or London might have sampled pear, apple, grape, or pineapple candies, flavored for the first time not with the products of agriculture, but with compounds synthesized in chemical laboratories. The nineteenth century saw the beginnings of organic chemistry and the growth of the chemical industry, as industrialization provided ample carbon-rich material for chemists' new experiments with synthesis. Some of these chemicals were strongly aromatic. August Hofmann, the distinguished chemist and member of the Royal Society, analyzed the chemicals behind these imitation flavors in his report to the Crystal Palace exhibition jury. "The striking similarity of the smell of these ethers...

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