Friday's Google Doodle raises a coffee cup for the 225th birthday of chemist Friedlieb Ferdinand Runge, who discovered caffeine. One day, while experimenting with potentially deadly chemicals without adult supervision, the teenage Runge splashed some belladonna extract into his eyes. Runge wasn't the first person to realize the effects of belladonna on the eyes; women in Renaissance Italy used belladonna eyedrops as a cosmetic, sometimes with disastrous effects on their vision in the long run. Fortunately for the sleep-deprived, Runge set to work and soon isolated the compound that gave coffee its potency: caffeine. Sadly, there's no record of how much coffee Runge consumed to fuel all that time in the lab.

Source: Forbes February 08, 2019 06:00 UTC