Edward Robinson Squibb

Edward Robinson Squibb (1819-1900) was a physician and U.S. Navy surgeon who became frustrated by the impure, inconsistent medicines of the 1850s and developed a steam-distillation method for making pure ether.

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.