FRIEDRICH BAYER

1825–1880

German businessman Friedrich Bayer (formerly Beyer) began his career as an apprentice selling natural dyes to the textile industry. After teaching himself how to produce artificial dyes, he founded his own company. This would go on to become Bayer AG, one of the largest manufacturers of chemicals and pharmaceuticals in the world.

While an apprentice working for Wesenfeld & Co. in Wuppertal, Germany, 14-year-old Friedrich Bayer became familiar with the workings of the dyeing trade and went on to be a successful salesperson. In 1848, at the age of 23, he founded his own dye company and established a distribution network across Europe.

Until the mid-19th century, dyes were derived from plants, minerals, and animals. From the 1850s, companies could manufacture artificial dyes in a wider range of colors by combining chemical extracts from coal tar with other compounds. Bayer decided to start producing artificial dyes and, with a friend, dyer Johann Friedrich Weskott, he experimented with new chemical combinations and produced dyes of far better quality than his competitors. In 1863, the two men established the company that would later become Bayer AG. They initially employed just 12 workers, but the company grew rapidly, and by 1880, that number had increased to 300. Bayer died in 1880, at a time when the company was supplying dyes and chemicals to textile companies worldwide. He did not live to see the company’s most famous product—the painkilling drug aspirin, a pharmaceutical spin-off from the dye industry first distributed in 1899.

Early dyeing jiggers used by Friedrich Bayer & Co. passed fabrics through rollers to dip them in and out of large vats of dye.