Eli Lilly began with three workers and a sign reading Chemist
In 1876 Civil War veteran Eli Lilly opened a small drug works in Indianapolis with three employees, one of them his son, under a sign reading Eli Lilly, Chemist. First-year sales came to $4,470. In November 2025 his company became the first health-care business ever valued at $1 trillion.
Lilly, a pharmaceutical chemist who served in the Union army, had tried partnerships first: a drugstore in Paris, Illinois, from 1869 and a manufacturing venture called Johnston and Lilly in 1874. Once on his own, one of his earliest products was quinine for malaria. His brother James became the first full-time salesman in 1878, and sales reached $48,000 the next year. A tonic called Succus Alteran, sold from 1883 as a blood purifier, became an early bestseller, while gelatin coatings, fruit flavours and sugar-coated pills made medicines easier to swallow. In 1886 chemist Ernest Eberhardt joined as the first full-time researcher.
Colonel Lilly handed daily management to his son Josiah around 1890 and died in 1898, leaving a catalogue of 2,005 products and annual sales above $300,000. Josiah ran the firm for 34 years, introducing scientific management and reaching $1 million in sales by 1905. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake the company shipped medicine to help. By 1917 Scientific American called it the largest capsule factory in the world, able to turn out 2.5 million a day. The hiring of biochemist George Clowes around 1919 and 1920 marked its move into serious research.
That research paid off in firsts. Lilly was the first to mass-produce insulin and the Salk polio vaccine of 1955, and among the first to make human insulin with recombinant DNA. It later sold Prozac from 1986 and Cymbalta from 2004.
Today, headquartered in Indianapolis with offices in 18 countries, it sells in about 125 nations and ranks as the world's most valuable drugmaker. Tirzepatide, marketed as Mounjaro and Zepbound, brought in 56 percent of 2025 revenue. The Lilly Endowment, a family charity set up in 1937, still owns 9.8 percent of the company.
Source: Eli Lilly and Company
