
An ordinary day in his life, one honest mistake, and it led to the discovery of LSD. Albert Hofmann never thought he’d be going down a trippy road when he first touched LSD. But that wasn’t the last time he touched the drug either.
In 1938, a 32-year-old Swiss chemist named Albert Hofmann was working at Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, trying to synthesize new stimulants from ergot fungus. It was a toxic grain mold that had haunted humanity for centuries. His goal was to find a circulatory and respiratory stimulant by synthesizing the active compounds in ergot.