Who Founded Bristol-Myers Squibb?

Squibb resigned his Navy post and opened a small laboratory in Brooklyn in 1858 to make pure ether, chloroform and other medicines. The laboratory burned down on Christmas Eve that year; a group of doctors and surgeons put up $2,100 so he could reopen in 1859. He published his ether method rather than patenting it, supplied medicines to the Union Army during the Civil War, and pushed for stricter purity standards, self-publishing Squibb's Ephemeris of Materia Medica when the American Medical Association would not adopt them. His sons Charles and Edward took over as his health declined, and the firm became E.R. Squibb & Sons in 1895. They sold it in 1905, and Squibb merged with Bristol-Myers in 1989. Edward Robinson Squibb was born in 1819.

In 1887 Bristol and Myers bought the Clinton Pharmaceutical Company of Clinton, New York, reportedly for about $5,000. The business was renamed Bristol, Myers and Company in May 1898, and after Myers died in 1899 Bristol renamed it the Bristol-Myers Corporation. Its first nationally recognized product was Sal Hepatica, a laxative mineral salt sold from the 1890s, followed by Ipana toothpaste in 1901. Under the Bristol family the company grew into a consumer and pharmaceutical group that later added Clairol and Drackett and entered antibiotics after World War II, before merging with Squibb in 1989.

William McLaren Bristol was born in 1860.

Myers and Bristol bought the Clinton Pharmaceutical Company in Clinton, New York, in 1887 and renamed it Bristol, Myers and Company in 1898. Myers died in 1899, before the company's first national brands took off, but his name stayed on the business through the 1989 merger that created Bristol-Myers Squibb.

John Ripley Myers was born in 1864.

Myers was born on October 8, 1864 and died on December 22, 1899.