Josiah Kirby Lilly was an American pharmaceutical manufacturer, businessman and philanthropist.
Background
Josiah Kirby Lilly was born on November 18, 1861 in Greencastle, Indiana, United States, the only child of Eli Lilly and Emily (Lemon) Lilly. His mother, of Scottish-Irish ancestry, was the daughter of a Greencastle merchant. His father traced his descent from Gustave Lilli, a French settler who had come with his Dutch wife to Maryland in 1789. Eli Lilly had lived in Kentucky before moving to Indiana in the 1850's. After serving in the Union Army during the Civil War, he tried growing cotton in Mississippi; but his wife died, he and his son contracted malaria, and in 1866 he returned to Indiana. Three years later he became a partner in a retail drug business in Paris, Illinois. He later moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, where in 1876 he set up a small business to manufacture drugs. Josiah Lilly spent four of his childhood years with his staunch Methodist grandparents in Greencastle.
Education
Lilly entered the preparatory department of the local Asbury College (later DePauw University) in 1875. In 1880 he entered the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, from which he was graduated, Ph. G. cum laude, in 1882.
Career
Lilly joined his father's new business in 1876. In 1881, Eli Lilly formally incorporated the business as Eli Lilly and Company, and Josiah was placed in charge of the laboratory. He was named a director in 1887 and, upon the death of his father in 1898, president. He continued in that office until 1932, when he became chairman of the board. At the time Josiah Lilly entered drug manufacturing, the industry, while an ancient one, was small-scale, its products simple. The Lilly company's twenty-four employees turned out principally sugar- and gelatin-coated pills, elixirs, fluid extracts, and syrups. From the outset the firm produced "ethical" or prescription drugs rather than the more lucrative and popular patent medicines.
Lilly, with his pharmaceutical training, was particularly interested in standards of manufacturing and in scientifically developed products. With Ernest G. Eberhardt, one of the first graduates of Purdue University's College of Pharmacy, he set up a scientific division in the company in 1886. Four years later he established a botanical department, and in 1891 a company library. Thus prepared, Eli Lilly and Company both contributed to and benefited from the chemotherapy revolution in medicine during the early decades of the twentieth century.
As president, Lilly turned his attention to finances, sales, and expansion. By 1903 the firm had branch houses in Kansas City, Chicago, St. Louis, New Orleans, and New York City; by 1905 sales had reached $1 million annually. Four years later the company counted a hundred traveling representatives. In 1914 Lilly opened a biological department on a 156-acre tract of land in Greenfield, Indiana. Belladonna and stramonium grown on the Greenfield farms helped relieve drug shortages during World War I.
After the war Eli Lilly and Company assisted in the development and preparation of insulin on the invitation of its discoverer, Dr. Frederick Grant Banting, marketing the first commercially produced insulin in the United States in 1923. Other products developed in the company laboratories over the next two decades included barbiturates, ephedrine preparations, and liver extracts. During World War II, Eli Lilly and Company supplied the United States government with more than two hundred different pharmaceuticals, including penicillin, vitamins, and Merthiolate, and processed and delivered without charge more than a million quarts of blood plasma. Immediately after the war the firm acquired land at Lafayette, Indiana, for a plant to manufacture antibiotics.
The company developed its foreign market during the interwar years, finding outlets in Mexico, Central and South America, and the Far East. Its first foreign subsidiary, Eli Lilly and Company, Ltd. , was organized in London in 1934. This was followed in 1938 by a Canadian subsidiary, and in 1943 and 1944 by subsidiaries in Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. He was active in civic and philanthropic organizations, particularly in Indianapolis. In 1937 Lilly and his sons established the Lilly Endowment, Inc. , a foundation for the "promotion and support of religious, educational or charitable purposes. " Relatively small at the start, it had grown by the 1970's into one of the largest foundations in America. Lilly gave to the University of Pittsburgh his extensive collection of materials by and about the composer Stephen Foster. Lilly believed in close attention to business, but he seems to have been a kindly, if paternalistic, employer. Lilly died of cancer in Indianapolis in his eighty-seventh year and was buried there in Crown Hill Cemetery.
Achievements
Under Lilly's leadership, Eli Lilly and Company introduced standardized manufacturing processes, expanded its sales force, and increased its research efforts to develop new drugs. The company grew into one of the largest and most influential pharmaceutical corporations in the world, and the largest corporation in Indiana. Lilly received many honors for his contributions to pharmaceutical manufacturing, including the Remington Medal (1942), awarded by the New York section of the American Pharmaceutical Association.
He was a member of Christ Episcopal Church of Indianapolis.
Politics
He was a member of the Republican Party.
Connections
On November 18, 1882, Lilly married Lilly Marie Ridgely of Lexington, Kentucky. They had two sons, Eli and Josiah Kirby. His wife died in 1934, and on June 29, 1935, he married Lila Allison Humes.
