American cyanamid

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American Cyanamid was a large chemical company in the United States founded by Frank Washburn in 1907 . The company had over 100,000 employees in the 1970s. It was the first US manufacturer to produce Albert Bruce Sabin 's polio vaccine . In 1994, American Home Products made a US $ 9.5 billion tender offer to purchase American Cyanamid. The business was the second largest industrial acquisition in United States history at the time. In the years that followed, American Home Products changed its name to Wyeth , which was acquired by Pfizer in 2009 .

history

Between 1905 and 1906, Adolph Frank tried to sell the calcium cyanamide produced in the Frank Caro process through family contacts in the United States . Contact with Frank Washburn came through the La Società Generale per la Cianamide . The company offered him a license for the process. Washburn had previous fertilizer experience through his work at WR Grace and Company and had also built three dams in the southern United States to generate electricity.

Web pages

Individual evidence

  1. Anthony S. Travis: Nitrogen Capture: The Growth of an International Industry (1900-1940) , Springer Verlag, 2018, ISBN 978-3-319-68962-3 , pp. 79-85.