This article is rife with innuendo and fabrications. Emil Fischer first developed a caffeine synthesis starting from uric acid. It's mentioned in his 1902 Nobel

This article is rife with innuendo and fabrications. Emil Fischer first developed a caffeine synthesis starting from uric acid. It's mentioned in his 1902 Nobel Prize address: https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/fischer-lecture-2.pdf https://www.nobelprize.org/uploads/2018/06/fischer-lecture-2... "Among the purine substances there are two valued drugs, caffeine and theobromine, which so far had to be prepared by extraction from tea and cocoa. Their production is not altogether insignificant for their value may be estimated at more than one million marks a year. Now that these drugs can be made synthetically from inexpensive uric acid the mind readily turns to exploiting the synthesis on an industrial scale: it is no secret that several factories in Germany are seriously tackling the problem. Synthetic theophylline has already appeared on the market and I have no doubt that synthetic theobromine and caffeine will very soon follow." The 1938 edition of Thorpe's Dictionary of Applied Chemistry says: "Caffeine is prepared synthetically in large quantities from theobromine by methylation with dimethyl sulphate in alkaline solution, a method which has largely displaced the older synthetic process from uric acid." This advertorial junk page has exploited a perfect information gap: - Most of the true history of synthetic caffeine is from the first half of the 20th century; much of it remains undigitized, and much of what has been digitized is still under copyright and behind paywalls or other access barriers. - Germany was the world center of chemistry before World War II and so the most relevant documents won't be found by people searching with English key words. - The real history of synthetic caffeine starts with a German chemistry professor who died while Hitler was still a nobody. That's far less "viral" as a story than an exciting weave binding together Nazis, Monsanto, China, and Pfizer. If you want to read more about the early history of synthetic caffeine, the 1921 edition of "Modern Chemistry: Pure and Applied" shows Fischer's original caffeine synthesis and subsequent industrial processes along with patent numbers (mostly German): https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433079416818&view=1up&seq=175 https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=nyp.33433079416818&vi...