Joseph Burnett was born in Southboro, Massachusetts on November 11, 1820. Upon his graduation from the Worcester College of Pharmacy in 1840 he was employed by Theodore Metcalf who owned a pharmacy in Boston. By 1845 he had become a full partner in the business renamed the Metcalf & Burnett Chemical Company. Burnett had rapidly established his reputation as a dealer of products with highest standard for purity. His reputation was burnished when a Boston dentist used ether purchased from Burnett to perform the first successful painless surgery on a patient in October 1846.
His greatest and most lucrative professional achievement however was his perfection of the process for the production of vanilla extract. This accomplishment marked the beginning of a revolution in the manufacture of flavor extracts for culinary enhancement in the United States and beyond.
In 1858 he launched the Joseph Burnett & Co. along with his partner William Edmonds. His line of products had expanded to a complete line of extracts including Orange, Cinnamon, Nutmeg, Peach, Rose, Almond, and Nectarine among many others. The company also sold skin and hair care products as well as colognes and tooth wash. Two of the most popular products were Kalliston for healthy skin and Cocaine for the Hair developed by Burnett in 1857 in response to the public’s fascination with cocaine infused products.
A short time before his death in 1894, Joseph Burnett and his sons opened a new factory in Boston exclusively devoted to the production of flavoring extracts, colored pastes and liquids, frostings and spices. This was a prescient decision in anticipation of the impending federal laws and regulations at the beginning of the twentieth century that would prohibit the sale of certain items in Burnett’s line of products. The Burnett Company continued to flourish in the decades following Joseph Burnett’s death, adding new products to their already popular catalog of merchandise.
To see a small catalog of Burnett’s products from the late nineteenth century explore Burnett’s Floral Handbook 1880 on the Otis Library’s Flickr site of historical photographs.