Colonel Eli Lilly, a pharmaceutical chemist and Union artillery officer in the Civil War, went through failed partnerships with James W. Binford in Paris, Illinois, and John F. Johnston in Indianapolis before opening Eli Lilly and Company in Indianapolis in 1876 under a sign that read simply “Eli Lilly, Chemist.” He started with three employees, including his teenage son Josiah, known as J.K., and focused on practical medicines such as quinine for malaria. To make medicine bearable, he coated pills in gelatin and sugar and added fruit flavorings to liquids. Sales reached $48,000 by 1879, and the 1883 blood purifier Succus Alterans became a hit for syphilis, rheumatism and skin disease.
In 1890 the Colonel handed daily control to J.K., who ran the company for 34 years, and turned to civic work and to lobbying for federal regulation that would drive patent medicine hucksters out of business. He died in 1898 leaving over 2,000 products. In 1919 J.K. hired biochemist George Henry Alexander Clowes, whose academic ties led to a 1922 agreement with the University of Toronto team of Banting, Best and Macleod. By 1923 Lilly sold the first commercially available insulin in the United States as Iletin. Grandsons Eli Jr. and Joe industrialized production, and in 1953 Eugene N. Beesley became the first president from outside the family.
- Brother James Lilly joined in 1878 as the company’s first full-time national traveling salesman.
- J.K. studied at the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and took over the laboratory in 1882.
- Eli Jr. introduced photographically reproduced manufacturing tickets in 1909 to eliminate transcription errors, then straight-line production in the 1920s.
- Lilly’s insulin purification gave it an effective U.S. commercial monopoly for nearly two years.
- In World War II Lilly dried over two million pints of blood plasma for the Red Cross, roughly 20 percent of the U.S. supply, and mass-produced penicillin and Merthiolate.
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