Abstract
The discovery of penicillin was a landmark event in medicine and microbiology. With its aid, many dangerous infectious diseases became controllable. The use of penicillin by the medical services of the US and UK forces facilitated the recovery of many injured combatants during World War II. Penicillin, once a rare drug, difficult to isolate and produce, can now be considered a typical “commodity chemical”—that is, a commercially important pure chemical compound, which is bought and sold in large amounts in a competitive market. The capacity to produce large amounts of penicillin was a turning point in the history of the fermentation industry. The commercial production of penicillin was made possible by extensive new developments in the very large-scale growth of microorganisms. The drama of the penicillin story tends to overshadow the preceding decades of development in industrial microbiology. This chapter highlights the commodity chemical production by microorganisms before the 1940s.