When Was the First Antibiotic Mass-Produced?

Although Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, mass production didn't begin until 1943, driven by the urgent needs of World War II. Howard Florey and Ernst Boris Chain at Oxford University proved penicillin's therapeutic value in 1941, but Britain lacked industrial capacity for large-scale production. The U.S. War Production Board organized a crash program involving 21 companies. Pfizer developed deep-tank fermentation, scaling output from a few liters to thousands of gallons. By D-Day in June 1944, enough penicillin had been manufactured to treat every wounded Allied soldier. Fleming, Florey, and Chain shared the 1945 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.