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Sweet N Low Research Paper

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The year is 1878 in Baltimore, Maryland. Constantin Fahlberg had come home from his job as a chemist and was about to have a delicious meal. He had spilled something on his hand while working in his lab earlier but that didn’t concern him. Instead he grabbed a roll off of the dinner table, plopped it into his mouth, and sat down to eat. To his amazement the roll tasted amazingly sweet, too sweet to just have been a roll his wife made. Realizing it was from the substance he spilled on his hand, he dashed to the lab he worked at and tasted everything at his worktable, especially tasting the vials, beakers, and dishes he used for his experiments. Finally he found the source of the sweetness: an overboiled beaker in which o-sulfobenzoic acid had reacted with phosphorus (V) chloride and ammonia, producing benzoic sulfimide or as what most people know as the synthetic sugar called saccharin (Hicks, Jesse).
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This product was the first artificial sweetener to be publicly sold and through its distribution there became monstrous effects on the old customs of sweetening. Before Sweet N’ Low was invented, people primarily used sugar and molasses as sweeteners, but other ingredients such as honey, maple syrup, and brown rice syrup were still in high use. These substitutes for sugar were great for its time but Sweet N’ Low was able to satisfy the modern era through its many advantages that these products did not have. Sugar cane was difficult due to the agricultural restrictions, since it required a warm, rainy climate to be able to grow (The Pros and Cons of Biofuels). Maple syrup and honey were inefficient since they could only be retrieved during certain times of the year and then once retrieved it took a lengthy period of preparation before it could be sold (Foreman, Diana). With the advantages Sweet N’ Low had, companies, stores, and businesses quickly began to get involved with the idea of artificial

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