Foods, artificial nitrogenous

Saccharin is, of course, the famous artificial sweetener. It was discovered at Johns Hopkins University in 1879 in the days before disposable gloves. Ira Remsen (1846-1927) asked a research fellow Constantin Fahlberg (1850-1910) to oxidize a sulfonamide he had made. Fahlberg did so and found that evening that the food he was eating tasted remarksbly sweet. Saccharin is a cyclic imide with a nitrogen atom acylated on one side by a sulfonic add and on the other by a carboxylic acid. 

By the end of the nineteenth century it had become clear that a crisis was looming in agriculture. The warning was most forcefully made in 1898 by William Crookes in a speech to the British Association when he pointed out that the vast nitrate deposits in Chile were being exploited at such a rate that they would be exhausted within a generation. Without the application of nitrates to the land, crop yields would fall dramatically and food shortages would be inevitable. There was clearly a need to develop a process to fix atmospheric nitrogen to enable nitrate fertilisers to be made artificially. 

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