Eager to improve upon the hard-to-dissolve pills available in the early 1880s, William Erastus Upjohn developed a friable version. On Oct. 14, 1884, he filed a patent application for his innovation. He received a patent a year later.
Using the fortune his invention generated through The Upjohn Co., which he founded with his three brothers, W.E., as he was known, created an unmatchable legacy that continues to benefit today’s Kalamazoo residents.
Upjohn was born in Richland Township in 1853, the ninth of 12 children of a country doctor, Uriah Upjohn, and his wife, Maria. Upjohn and three of his brothers followed their father’s footsteps and became doctors. Upjohn obtained his medical degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in 1875, and went into practice with an uncle in Hastings.
His experience growing up on a farm stoked his interest in creativity. It was a time when families often had to devise their own solutions for operational problems they encountered.
Not every innovation worked. W.E. and a partner, Fred Sweet of Hastings, developed and brought to market a clock powered by electromagnetism. The venture, however, wasn’t commercially successful and left the young doctor saddled with debt.
One of his physician brothers, Henry Uriah Upjohn, also dabbled in inventions. Among Henry’s innovations was a knot-tyer for hay-binding machines that he sold to a farm machinery company for $1,500 — a small fortune at the time.
Shortly after W.E. opened his own medical practice in 1880, he set his sights on a lofty goal — solving medicine’s most frustrating problem of effectively administering medicines to the sick.
Doctors prescribing pharmaceuticals to patients in those times had a choice of liquid medication, powder, or pills. The medicine in those early pills was coated with clay or a thin layer of shellac.
Clay and shellac, however, hardened over time — allowing the pills to pass through the stomach undissolved, with no benefit to the patient.
Working in the attic of his home, Upjohn began experimenting with assorted designs for “friable” pills that would easily crumble to powder.
For his solution, Upjohn described his final process, where he introduced a starter particle in a revolving pan. As the pan revolved, he sprayed the starter with powdered medicine and a fine mist. He repeated that process very gradually, until he formed a pill containing the appropriate dosage of medicine.
Upjohn was 32 years old when he filed his patent application for his friable pill on Oct. 14, 1884. He received the patent the following year.
“Dr. Upjohn built his new pill, layer by layer, like a snowball rolling down a hill. The resulting product was essentially dry to begin with and could not dry out over time. It is easily dissolved when ingested. It was also friable — it could be crushed under your thumb,” according to an historical journal. “His ingenuity had solved two problems: how to deliver medicine that would dissolve in the body, and how to ensure precise control over the amount and quality of the active ingredients.”
Upjohn received a second patent for a machine he designed to mass-produce his new pill. He moved his operation temporarily from his attic to the upper floor of an abandoned Hastings feed mill before he, his wife, Rachel, and their four children moved to Kalamazoo.
With his three brothers — Henry, Frederick, and James — W.E. established The Upjohn Pill and Granule Co. in 1885.
To drum up business, he sent kits of small pine boards with samples of his friable pill, set alongside a hard-shelled pill, to thousands of doctors. To prove how his invention solved the problem of hard pills, he asked his medical customers to hammer the pills into the boards to see which were the softest and most digestible. Upjohn’s version was the clear winner.
A diagram of his thumb pressing down on a pill and reducing it to powder became the trademark symbol of Upjohn for the next 60 years.
By the end of 1886, The Upjohn Pill and Granule Co. had 12 employees and manufactured pills from 186 different “medicinal formulas,” with sales topping $50,000, according to Upjohn historic journals.
By 1890, revenue grew to $132,500 and the company was on its way to becoming the largest employer in the city.
In 1902, the name of the business was changed to The Upjohn Co. After the brothers had a falling out, in 1909 W.E. bought them all out and took sole control of the business.
Three years later, tragedy struck. After 27 years of marriage, Rachel Upjohn died of cancer. Eight years later, in 1913, W.E. united the two most powerful families in Kalamazoo when he married the widow of James F. Gilmore, a co-founder of the Gilmore Brothers department stores.
As an industry titan, W.E. didn’t let success consume him. He invigorated and created loyalty within his sales force. As an example, he gave them full commission for their sales, meaning they were no longer credited or shared with supervisors, sales managers, or company accounts, as was the custom. He also was among the first to offer employees higher wages, shorter hours, and group insurance.
Upjohn was granted a second patent for a machine he designed to mass-produce his new pill. The company went on to produce millions of pills, which generated billions of dollars in revenue.
The Upjohn Co. would go on to become a multibillion-dollar company, and for more than 100 years it was a worldwide leader in pharmaceuticals, employing up to 30,000 workers around the world. During that time, Upjohn developed, manufactured, and distributed scores of important and popular drugs, including antibiotics such as penicillin.
Upjohn remained a family business until 1995, when it merged with Swedish-based Pharmacia AB and was renamed Pharmacia Corp. In 2002, the company was purchased by Pfizer.
A Michigan Historical Site marker honoring Upjohn and his company was placed in the Kalamazoo Mall in 1986. Twenty years later, he was named to the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
After his death in 1932, an associate writing a tribute in the company’s newsletter, The Overflow, said Upjohn’s greatest contribution to Kalamazoo may have been one that cost him very little money: implementing a new form of city government.
Upjohn, also referred to as Kalamazoo’s “First Citizen,” spearheaded the effort to write and adopt a new charter for a debt-ridden city government. He chaired the reform commission and was instrumental in the writing of a new charter that set up the commission/city manager form of government that still serves Kalamazoo today.
To ensure a successful launch of the new government, Upjohn served a three-year term, from 1918-21, as the city’s first mayor under the new municipal charter.
That’s one reason Upjohn was named Person of the Century by his hometown newspaper, the Kalamazoo Gazette, for the outsized and indelible impact the inventor, industrialist, and philanthropist had on his community. The recognition was all the more remarkable given it came on Jan. 1, 2000, nearly 70 years after his death.
Even today, reminders of his civic contributions are abundant in Kalamazoo. He funded the construction of the original Bronson Hospital, now Bronson Methodist Hospital, in 1904. He also built and gifted the 500-seat Civic Auditorium to the city in 1931.
W.E.’s belief that leisure time well spent was essential for a healthy community prompted his interest in parks and recreational venues.
He bought a section of swampy land near the city center, drained and restored the property, and added surrounding lots to create an 18-acre parcel. He then hired a famous landscape architect from Chicago to create what is now Upjohn Park, which he donated to the city in 1919.
In a similar vein, the Art House and an 18-hole municipal golf course were funded by Upjohn.
Even though he was not outwardly religious, he contributed to the design and building of several area landmark churches. In addition, he paid off the debt of one church and provided an annuity in his will to pay its expenses for five years.
“He was a practical man, not a mystic or dreamy idealist. Too much concern about the future he believed was a waste of time,” his colleague wrote in The Overflow.
“Now is what matters, not yesterday nor tomorrow,” Upjohn was fond of saying. “Man is what he is, not what he was or will be.”
Two lasting contributions Upjohn made to Kalamazoo and the state of Michigan were his creation of the Kalamazoo County Foundation and the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.
In 1925, he provided seed money to create a foundation supporting racial, social, and economic justice efforts in Kalamazoo County. Foundation grants focused on equity and education. His total contributions to the foundation, which were passed through his will after his death, are estimated to be worth $60 million today.
In its latest available financial reports, the foundation in 2022 awarded grants of more than $21 million.
Over the years, Upjohn’s affinity for his employees prompted his interest in creating an unemployment insurance program to aid displaced workers. The Great Depression was an opportunity for him to set up a model program that he envisioned would be copied around the country.
He also bought more than 1,700 acres in nearby Richland County and set up a co-op farm where the unemployed could work and earn income for themselves and their families. Just before his death in 1932, he formalized that effort by creating the W.E. Upjohn Unemployment Trustee Corp.
In 1945, the Trustee Corp. morphed into the W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, which is dedicated to researching the causes and consequences of unemployment, and helping displaced people find work.
Today, the institute has a staff of nearly 100 people, including researchers who focus on labor markets. Other core areas of support include the causes of unemployment and the effectiveness of social safety net programs in mitigating its effects, education and training systems to improve workers’ employability and earnings, and the influence of state and local economic development policies on local labor markets.
The institute also assesses emerging trends affecting workers and labor markets in its core research areas.
As much as he loved his pharmaceutical business, W.E. was even more passionate about gardening. Brook Lodge, his beloved 40-acre summer home in Augusta, near Battle Creek, was awash with Japanese iris, roses, phlox, columbine, daisies, and his favorite, peonies.
“The peonies were my father’s salvation and his companions. He loved growing them; he loved talking about them; he loved picking them; he even wrote his own definitions of the different varieties and had them printed in a booklet,” his daughter, Genevieve Upjohn, wrote.
In 1922, nearing his 70th birthday, Upjohn donated his vast collection of peonies to the University of Michigan, which in turn commissioned a professor of landscape design to create the W.E. Upjohn Peony Garden.
When in full bloom from late May to mid-June, 800 peonies and more than 10,000 flowers bordering Nichols Arboretum attract thousands of visitors, as they did at Brook Lodge a century ago.
“His Sundays in June were always busy as he spent his time in the fields with guests, mostly strangers; but this was a great joy for him — talking peonies, picking peonies, and showing off his spectacular display of white, pink, and red,” Genevieve Upjohn wrote. “But Dad loved the whole confusion. It provided him with company, (and) someone to talk to about his flowers.”
