Word: rahway
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George Merck liked the country so much that he settled in Manhattan. He was quick to see the immense opportunities for technical industry in this new nation, growing up behind its protective-tariff walls. His U.S. partnership of Merck & Co. bought 150 acres at Rahway, NJ. In 1903 the plant began making much the same line of chemicals and medicinals as its parent firm was making on the other side of the tariff wall...
Major was interested. For more than a year, tons of rice bran poured into one end of the Merck plant in Rahway and fractions of an ounce of B1 trickled out at the other end. Williams and the Merck-men tackled the job of synthesis, and in 1936 succeeded in making B1 easily and cheaply from simple organic compounds. Merck went into big-scale production. Result: medicine at last had a weapon to vanquish beriberi...
Other companies did, and got into penicillin faster. But Merck got a head start with the next antibiotic, streptomycin. When Rutgers' Dr. Selman Waksman found that his beloved soil bacteria had made something that killed many germs which penicillin did not affect, he took the culture to Rahway. Though half a dozen companies are making streptomycin today, the best guess is that Merck microbes, in their own temple of vats at Elkton, Va., make 40% of the U.S. output...
...Rahway, the convicts, leaderless and disorganized, held on. But the end was foreshadowed by another bedsheet hung from a window. It bore a plaintive, one-word message: "Water...
Message from the Window. As the hours dragged by, the rioters quieted.. Food and water supplies at both Trenton and Rahway gave out. The men drained stale water from fire hoses, broke radiators to draw off their rusty water. On the third day at Trenton, officials agreed to an investigation by the Osborne Association, a private organization interested in prison welfare. The next morning, after 77 hours of siege, the Trenton convicts gave...