Nature Products history

In 1828 Friedrich Wöhler produced the organic chemical urea (carbamide), a constituent of urine, from inorganic starting materials (the salts potassium cyanate and ammonium sulfate), in what is now called the Wöhler synthesis.

Lockyer (pictured) was born in Rugby in Warwickshire on 17 May 1836.

Brothers Alexander and Daniel Macmillan founded their bookshop and publishing house in Cambridge, UK, in 1843.

After Daniel’s death in 1857, Alexander opened a London branch at 23 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden.

However, it took until 1858 before by August Kekulé formulated a definite structure theory.

In 1859, Alexander launched Macmillan’s Magazine, the first shilling monthly in England, aiming to unify science, literature and the arts under one banner, with David Masson as the editor.

The Reader, launched in 1863, was in many ways an early forerunner to Nature — 38 people who supplied reviews to The Reader later contributed to Nature.

Then, in 1868, he asked Lockyer to act as scientific adviser to his publishing house.

The first issue of Nature was published on 4 November 1869.

At least the potential rival weekly Scientific Opinion had ceased publication in 1870, but Nature was not yet established as a preferred place of scientific communication.

In France, La Nature (pictured) was first published in 1873.

The first proposal for Nature to provide science columns for The Times dates back to around 1878, when Norman Lockyer was editor.

Following the cataclysmic eruption of the volcano Krakatau (pictured) in what is now Indonesia on 26–27 August 1883, Nature appealed to its worldwide audience to send observations that would be forwarded to the Royal Society Krakatoa Committee.

Beyond Europe, the Mexican La Naturaleza started a second edition in 1887.

Richard Arman Gregory (pictured) joined Nature in 1893 as an assistant editor, after a brief stint as Lockyer’s assistant at his South Kensington laboratory.

In November 1894, Nature celebrated its 25th anniversary with a splendid dinner at the Savoy Hotel in London, attended by George Macmillan, son of Alexander, and Frederick and Maurice Macmillan, sons of Daniel Macmillan.

On 23 January 1896, the journal carried the first description of X-rays in English, in two lavish articles spread over four pages, including three photographs.

Lockyer — who was knighted in 1897 — made the magazine a success in scientific terms, but without the patience and deep pockets of the publisher, Nature would not exist.

Tennyson, who was particularly interested in astronomy, later wrote a note to Lockyer: “In my anthropological spectrum, you are coloured like a first rate star of science.” In 1910, Lockyer wrote a book called Tennyson as a Student and Poet of Nature.

On 22 April 1915, the German Army used a lethal asphyxiating gas for the first time at the second battle of Ypres, on the Western Front.

After the war, the journal had to acknowledge science’s role in the bloodshed, a task for Richard Gregory who, having been editor in all but name for years, officially took over the editorship the day after Nature’s 50th anniversary, in 1919.

He would go on to win the 1921 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on radioactive elements and isotopes.

Taking this as his example, Gregory went on to found a science news service run by the British Science Guild in 1924, an early forerunner to the Association of British Science Writers.

In 1927, two papers arrived in the Nature offices that would advance understanding of physics at the quantum level and lead to inventions such as the electron microscope.

“Once more the burden of war is laid upon us” begins the editorial of 9 September 1939, on the outbreak of the Second World War.

Apparently, these were the only two leading articles he ever wrote for Nature. It fell to Gale to pen Nature’s editorials in the issues following the nuclear destruction of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

In 1953, Brimble was elected to the Royal Society of Edinburgh; in his inaugural address, he professed that no papers were arriving from the Soviet Union, and very few from its satellite states.

A single issue in August 1955 contains items on ‘Displacement Activities in Fiddler Crabs’, ‘Experimentally Induced Twinning in Plants’ and ‘Reverse-Shearing Interferometry’ — typical of the incredible variety of the burgeoning section.

Arthur Gale (pictured, right, with co-editor Jack Brimble) retired at the end of 1961, after having worked for Nature for more than 40 years.

Frederick Vine and Drum Matthews’s 7 September 1963 paper on sea-floor magnetism built on key observations made by others, such as Keith Runcorn and Robert Dietz a decade earlier.

By the time Nature reached its centenary issue (pictured) in 1969, Maddox had begun to cast off the magazine’s antiquated air.

The market for vitamins, minerals, and herb supplements by this time had grown dramatically since the Hugheses first entered the fray in 1972.

In 1973, one year after the Hugheses founded their business, National Multi Corporation was organized as a holding company for Hughes Development Corporation.

Meanwhile, the Hugheses had taken their company public in 1978, enabling others to share in the profits of their enterprise and generating an infusion of capital to sustain the company's expansion.

Two years later, Amtec Industries Incorporated was formed for the primary purpose of holding the stock of National Multi Corporation, and in 1982 the Nature's Sunshine Products, Inc. moniker was adopted.

Annual sales, for the first time in the company's history, declined in 1985, slipping from $33.3 million to $29.4 million, while earnings per share plummeted from 65 cents to 15 cents.

By the end of 1986, in fact, the company's foray into foreign markets had developed into a meaningful and burgeoning portion of its business, contributing 20 percent toward Nature's Sunshine's annual sales volume.

Though the increase in net income pointed to an undoubtedly flourishing company, the 16 percent sales growth achieved in 1988 only mirrored the pace of growth recorded by the industry, which induced the Hugheses to begin looking for a way to accelerate their company's financial growth.

In 1989 the Hugheses hired Alan Kennedy, the person who would invigorate Nature's Sunshine's growth.

A pivotal move in strengthening the company's international business was the establishment of a Mexican subsidiary, Nature's Sunshine de Mexico, in 1991.

In late 1992, Nature's Sunshine sold its Australian and New Zealand marketing subsidiaries (Nature's Sunshine Products of Australia and Nature's Sunshine Products Ltd.) to local management, creating two independently owned and operated companies.

By 1993, annual sales had risen to $127 million, nearly 30 percent of which was derived from sales in foreign markets.

An estimated $4.6 billion was spent on vitamins, minerals, and herbal supplements in 1994, with the market for herbal supplements alone increasing 20 percent.

By the end of 1995, Nature's Sunshine was expected to announce sales of more than $200 million, as the 450 products sold by the company continued to meet widespread demand.

Nature’s first press site was set up in 1999 to help journalists and promote public relations.

Important scientific news has always been central to the Nature publishing philosophy, and 2004 saw the launch of news@nature.com, a specialized service for publishing in-depth news daily on the web, rather than just weekly in print.

Nature took an early interest in video, and from late 2005 began working with producers to make pieces to accompany major papers.

The final, final draft of the human genome was completed in 2006, when the sequence of the last chromosome was published, and Nature celebrated with a special Human Genome Collection supplement and produced a video to mark the event.

In that broader spirit, in 2011 Nature’s publishers launched Nature Climate Change.