The company was founded by engineers Frank S. Washburn and Charles H. Baker in New York City in 1907, to capitalize on a German patent they had licensed for the manufacture of nitrogen products for fertilizer.

[18] At the same time, it was trying to raise political support, both grass-roots and via lobbying, to implement the Alabama power generation plan, and as it began to face competition for the American market.

[16][19][20][21][22] In 1917, Cyanamid purchased the Ammo-Phosphate Corporation, which owned a fertilizer plant in Linden, New Jersey manufacturing ammonium phosphate.

[24] With offers of free use of patents and processes, along with personnel and equipment, it enticed the United States government to approve and pay for its original plans for the Alabama plant, with some modifications, to help with the war effort.

A year later, a number of interests were competing to buy or lease it, including Air Nitrates/American Cynamid, General Electric, and Henry Ford.

[32][33] However by 1926, the list of bidders was far different as the Senate debated the merits of Air Nitrates in a joint venture with Union Carbide, the local power companies (who were most interested in the generating station), and a New York financial consortium.

[41] Cyanamid's pharmaceutical division included "Lederle Laboratories", maker of Piperacillin, an antibiotic drug used as a penicillin substitute; Centrum, a multivitamin supplement; Stresstabs vitamins; and Orimune, an oral polio vaccine.

In its final years, the company grappled with multiple legal challenges stemming from past environmental pollution incidents.

Tens of millions more were spent in efforts to clean up large wastewater pools which had decades of accumulation of toxic, carcinogenic, and teratogenic chemicals.

These are considered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to be among the most toxic chemical waste sites in the U.S. Cyanamid merged with American Home Products in 1994, and AHP changed its name to Wyeth which was then purchased by Pfizer in 2009.

It was flooded in the 1930s and again in August 1971 during Tropical Storm Doria, at which time the plant sustained major damage to its facilities and equipment.

However, impounds and wastesites remained with consequent leakage of benzene and numerous other chemicals into the Raritan River and adjacent land, apparently including residential sites.

[49] Subsequent testing showed no evident danger to humans, but the calamity intensified the extensive cleanup work already underway and the EPA announced another remediation plan for the site in September 2012.

Formica Corporation was taken private in a management buyout, and later went through a series of ownership changes, and is owned by Fletcher Building, headquartered in New Zealand.