Diacetylmorphine is first synthesized in 1874 by…

Diacetylmorphine is first synthesized in 1874 by C. R. Alder Wright, an English chemist working at St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London.

He had been experimenting with combining morphine with various acids.

He had boiled anhydrous morphine alkaloid with acetic anhydride for several hours and produced a more potent, acetylated form of morphine, now called diacetylmorphine or morphine diacetate.

Wright's invention does not lead to any further developments, and diacetylmorphine will become popular only after it is independently re-synthesized 2twenty-three years later by another chemist, Felix Hoffmann, and marketed under the trademark name Heroin.