This is a rather pedantic point even by my standards, but what Bayer actually did was to give the name Aspirin to a drug that had been known for thousands of years (obtained from the leaves of willow trees) and make it commercially available.
Acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) was first produced in 1853 by the French chemist Charles Frédéric Gerhardt, when he treated the medicine sodium salicylate with acetyl chloride. Over the remainder of the 19th century, various others established the chemical structure and came up with more efficient production methods. It was in 1897 that scientists at the Bayer company began studying acetylsalicylic acid as a less–irritating replacement medication for common salicylate medicines. By 1899, Bayer was selling Aspirin all around the world. Its popularity grew over the first half of the twentieth century, leading to competition between many brands and formulations. Wikipedia uses aspirin as an example of how brand names can become genericised if companies fail to establish a connection between their products and the names they use for them.
Football fans will not be surprised to hear (if they didn't already know) that Bayer has its headquarters in Leverkusen – a city of some 160,000 inhabitants, between Cologne and Düsseldorf, in the state of North Rhine–Westphalia. Founded twenty limes away in Barmen, in 1863, as a dyestuffs factory, aspirin was Bayer's first product and remains its best–known. In 1898 Bayer trademarked the name heroin for the drug diacetylmorphine, which it marketed as a cough suppressant and a non–addictive substitute for morphine until 1910. Other Bayer products include phenobarbital (used to treat epilepsy), prontosil (the first widely used antibiotic, for the discovery of which Bayer employee Gerhard Domagk received the 1939 Nobel Prize in Medicine), the antibiotic Cipro (ciprofloxacin), and the birth control pill Yaz (drospirenone).
In 2006 Bayer acquired its rival German pharmaceutical company Schering. In 2014 it acquired Merck & Co.'s consumer business, with brands such as Claritin, Coppertone and Dr. Scholl's, and in 2018 it acquired Monsanto, a leading producer of genetically engineered crops, for $63 billion.
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