THIS IS THE STORY of twenty-four geniuses who changed the face of the earth. The most brilliant men in Europe, they headed the industry known to the newspaper reader as "I. G. Farben."

I. G. Farben first subdued nature in ten thousand ways, then shipped the marvelous products of that victory across the seven seas. Its business has touched the life of every man and woman in the world. Often an unrecognized guest, it has visited every American home, with dyes, plastics, fabrics. If Farben did not make your bathroom fixtures, your shaving mug, or even your razor, your wife surely owes much of her prettification - from Easter hat to synthetic stockings - to I. G. Farben.
Stock of former Nazi chemicals giant to be delisted | Business ...
Long before the age of plastics and nylons, I. G. Farbenindustrie was known to many Americans as simply the world's best druggist. Every reputable pharmacy, every physician's bag, every good family medicine cabinet, stocks some of Farben's 6000 medicines. The firm invented a drug that is still the best cure for epilepsy. They made atabrine, the quinine-substitute for treating malaria. And from the aspirin tablet alone, I. G. Farben made a vast fortune.

But the founders were not concerned merely with balance sheets. They drew their inspiration from the gurgling of water, the perfume of damp earth, and every vegetable and mineral in the earth. Could health, personal beauty - yes, even universal brotherhood - be created by two dozen men of dynamic chemical genius? They believed it could. By 1925, they had nursed food from arid lands, made fats and fuels from coal and water, and were dreaming of making copper out of clay.

A few years later, their talents crowned a combine that overshadowed even the giant United States corporations. From the sun a competitor in nurturing such things as cotton -they had learned many economies of mass production. Now the sun shone with subservient benevolence on a fabulous industrial empire, from the Rhineland to the Hudson Valley to the muddy Yangtze River.
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