Pharmaceuticals and consumer products
Schering was founded in 1851 by Ernst Christian Friedrich Schering as Schering AG in Germany.
Plough, Incorporated was founded by the Memphis, Tennessee area entrepreneur Abe Plough (1892–1984) in 1908. He borrowed $125 from his father to start the business at age sixteen. As a one-man business, he mixed "Plough's Antiseptic Healing Oil," a "sure cure for any ill of man or beast," and sold it off a horse-drawn buggy.[1]
Plough's acquisitions included St Joseph's Aspirin for children,[1] Maybelline cosmetics, and Coppertone skin care products. Plough also had a broadcasting division, operating radio stations in Atlanta, Georgia (WPLO-AM & FM); Baltimore, Maryland (WCAO-AM & FM); Boston, Massachusetts (WCOP-AM & FM); Chicago, Illinois (WJJD-AM & FM); and Memphis, Tennessee (WMPS-AM & FM).[6]
Following the entry of the United States into World War II in 1941, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered Schering AG's U.S. assets be seized. These became the Schering Corporation. The company was placed under a government administratorship until 1952, when it was released, and its assets sold to the private sector.
In 1957, Schering acquired White Laboratories.[7]
In 1971, the Schering Corporation merged with Plough, Inc. At the time of the merger, Abe Plough became Chairman of the combined company.[8] In 2000, Schering-Plough bought a new campus in Summit, New Jersey from Novartis.
On March 12, 2007, Schering-Plough Corp. purchased Organon BioSciences, the drug unit of Netherlands-based Akzo Nobel, for $14.4 billion, giving the US pharmaceutical company an array of women's health products and numerous late-stage pipelines of experimental medicines.[9] Organon itself was founded in 1923 by Dr. Saal van Zwanenberg, the president of Zwanenberg's Slachterijen en Fabrieken.
On November 4, 2009 Schering-Plough merged with Merck & Co. and through a reverse merger, Merck became a subsidiary of Schering-Plough, which renamed itself Merck.[10][11][12][13]
Coopers Animal Health
One of Schering-Plough's plants, in Upper Hutt, New Zealand was the largest single site for the production of veterinary vaccines in the world. This was primarily because New Zealand's isolation has formed a natural quarantine, leaving the country free of rabies, foot and mouth, scrapie, bovine spongiform encephalopathy, and many other livestock diseases. It formerly had echinococcosis, but this has been eradicated. The site was known locally as Coopers Animal Health, a trademark which originated in the 1850s with a British company, Cooper & Nephews; the Coopers brand name was still in use by Schering-Plough in Australia, but not elsewhere.[14]
