Eli Lilly and Company grew from a tiny laboratory in Indianapolis in 1876 to one of the world's largest pharmaceutical companies.Colonel Eli Lilly, a pharmacist who had served as a Union officer in the American Civil War, acquired a laboratory on Pearl Street in Indianapolis in 1876 and started Eli Lilly and Company. His innovative process of gelatin-coating pills helped establish the success of the company. When Eli Lilly died in 1898, his son Josiah K. Lilly Sr. took control of the company. Josiah inherited his father's civic mindedness and ordered the company to send much needed medicine to support recovery efforts following the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.In 1919, Lilly hired biochemist George Henry Alexander Clowes as director of biochemical research. Clowes' negotiations with researchers who developed insulin at the University of Toronto helped launch the first successful large-scale production of insulin in 1923. The success of insulin enabled the company to attract well-respected scientists and, with them, make more medical advances.Eli Lilly, the grandson of Col. Lilly, was named as the company's president in 1932. In 1934, the company made its first venture overseas when a Lilly office was opened in England. World War II brought production at Lilly to a new high with the manufacturing of Merthiolate and blood plasma. In 1943, the company began full-scale production of penicillin.
