Health History | Bristol Myers Squibb — The Ether Lab Behind Squibb Park
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Health History | Bristol Myers Squibb — The Ether Lab Behind Squibb Park
kevin
People treat Bristol Myers Squibb as a New Jersey campus that arrived already named after two mergers.
The first pin is a Brooklyn waterfront laboratory that burned on Christmas.
In 1858 Edward Robinson Squibb, a former Navy surgeon who had already published a steam-distillation method for making ether, rented a small brick laboratory on Furman Street, below Brooklyn Heights.
He had resigned the service after a decade of watching impure drugs go to sea.
The Army Medical Corps had told him that if he could finance his own works, the army would send its orders.
On Christmas Eve, or in some accounts 29 December 1858, an assistant tipped a bottle of ether near an open flame.
The lab went up. Squibb ran back for his notebooks and came out with his clothes burned off and his face and hands seared.
Doctors and surgeons in the borough subscribed $2,100 in 1859 dollars to reopen him the next year.
He rebuilt on the same slope. By the 1880s the works were turning out hundreds of preparations sold on a purity standard he had failed to write into the official Pharmacopeia, so he published his own Ephemeris instead.
In 1892 the firm became E. R. Squibb and Sons. The sons sold it in 1905. Bristol-Myers and Squibb merged in 1989.
The laboratory site was taken for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in the 1940s.
What remains is Edward Robinson Squibb Park, a public playground on Furman Street at Middagh, opened in the late 1940s and named by local law in 1959.
City Parks still notes that the Squibb name can be read on surviving smokestacks above the expressway.
The plaque in the park is the honest object on the ground. The mechanism is the one Squibb refused to patent: a closed still and continuous steam distillation that made surgical ether reproducible, then a factory that treated purity as the product.
Stand on Furman Street and you are looking at the footprint, not the glass tower that later took the merged name.
Photo: Mill 1, CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons (Squibb Park plaque, 2022).
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