Saccharine derives from the Greek word meaning sugar. In English a large number of words of Greek origin came into the language after 1600. Saccharine was one of these words. The first recorded reference is from 1674, the year in which Thomas Blount published the fourth edition of his successful dictionary Glossographia.
This book is a key work in the history of English words with almost 1,500 words being introduced to the language for the first time. The cutest part of the book is its subtitle “A dictionary interpreting all such hard words, whether Hebrew, Greek or Latin”. His definition for the difficult word saccharine was “belonging to sugar, sweet like sugar”. And this is still the way the word saccharine is used.
Discovery of Saccharine
But in 1878 Constantin Fahlberg (born in Russia, died in Germany, made the discovery for which he is world famous in the United States) discovered an artificial sweetener which he called saccharin. With sweetness levels some 300 times that of sugar, it is used as an additive to many food products. At its discovery The Journal of the Society of Chemical Industry sniffs that “the inventors name the new substance ‘Saccharine’, although it is not related to the class of sugars, but is a derivative of benzoic acid. The scientific name of the substance is benzoylsulphimide”. The record is put straight in 1885 and two years later the British Medical Journal adds “saccharine is not at present procurable”.
But Fahlberg changed that. As soon as saccharin was patented (note saccharine without the “e”, he started producing it in a factory in Germany and although he was commercially successful, the real breakthrough for the product resulted from two separate factors. In the First World War there was a shortage of sugar. Saccharin has no calories. With the ongoing health and diet craze which started in the 1960s, saccharin was just the answer.
