 He rose to the positions of director (1918), secretary (1925), vice president (1929), president (1945) and chairman of the board (1949).His only absence from Pfizer, from 1913–18, came when he was a general superintendent at E. R. Squibb and Sons.In the early 1940s, he supervised Pfizer's successful development of a process for the large-scale manufacturing of penicillin and is credited as having led the transformation of Pfizer from a chemicals supplier to a research-based pharmaceuticals company.