>>The advent of artificial sugars came about...

I had a (to me) interesting conversation about this with one of my BILs. He'd previously managed research lab, mostly organic chemistry. I wanted to know how the hell did we figure out these odd chemicals that turn out to taste sweet - are people actually putting random chemicals in their mouths? He laughed for a bit, then told me one of his management challenges was in getting chemists to not taste known-harmful substances.