History of chromatography

The story of the discovery of chromatography is classical [16,17]. A most lucid analysis of Tswett s work from the point of view of the preparative applications of chromatography, has been written by Verzele and Dewaele [18]. The Russian botanist Tswett discovered arormd 1902 that plant pigments could be separated by eluting a sample of plant extract with a proper solvent on a column packed with a suitable adsorbent [1]. Did he name the technique chromatography because it separates pigment mixtures into a rainbow of colored bands, or because tswett means color in Russian, or both Nobody knows. What is remarkable, however, is the extreme care with which Tswett selected the adsorbents he used [19-21]. For the famous separation of a- and j3-carotenes, he tried 110 different adsorbents and selected inulin (a water-soluble polyfructose plant reserve material) as the 

There are very few serious claims to a glimpse at chromatography predating Tswett s work or even to an independent later discovery, in spite of the 30-year-long induction period that followed Tswett s earlier publications. The one who probably came closest was Day [22], who attempted to fractionate petroleum by filtration through columns of powdered limestone or fuller s earth. 

3 The Manhattan Project and the Purification of Rare Earth Elements 

4 The API Project and the Extraction of Purified Hydrocarbons from Crude Oils 

In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the American Petroleum Institute (API) used displacement chromatography to fractionate samples of virgin crude oil and petroleum distillates to determine their content of paraffins, naphthenes, olefins, and aromatics and to isolate many pure compounds that were identified for the first time in crude oil or crude oil extracts [42]. In addition to working on the laboratory scale. 

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The simplest and often the most cost effective way to combat friction is to reduce flow rate to a minimum. By no coincidence, this often leads to an increase in the efficiency of a separation since in many circumstances for preparative purifications, the less experienced have followed a linear scale-up from analytical column flow rates. In an ideal world each separation should, at some stage, involve a flow rate optimization. The fundamental principles behind this are discussed by JJ van Deemter[52 in what is probably the most cited paper in the history of chromatography. In summary, this suggests doing a graphical plot of separation efficiency versus flow rate and is particularly important for peptide purification where mass transport is comparatively slow. The van Deemter equation in simplified form can be represented as ... 

Headspace analysis, 151 Hildebrand s solubility parameter, 49, 159 History of chromatography, 1-4 Homologous series plots, 78, 80 Hydrogen bonding, 45, 141... 

Heftmann, E. History of Chromatography. In Chromatography—A Laboratory Handbook of Chromatographic and Electrophoretic Methods (E. Heftmann, Ed.), pp. 1-13. Van Nostrand Reinhold, NY, 1975. 

These words were the catalyst for a look into the history of the first seventy-five years of chromatography [1]. Their significance is emphasized when we recall that the ECD was invented by James E. Lovelock at the behest of Martin, once the Welch Professor at the University of Houston. Martin passed away in 2002 with little note of his contribution to chromatography. In their history of chromatography, L. S. Ettre and A. Zlatkis first gave a biographical sketch of Martin and then a narrative of his accomplishments. 

The history of chromatography and adsorption chromatography, from its earliest pre-Christian antecedents to its explicit discovery by Tswett and its subsequent development by more recent workers, has been covered in great detail by other writers [e.g.. Refs. 1-4) for reasonably complete coverage]. These historical reviews emphasize the experimental side of adsorption chromatography almost to the exclusion of theoretical contributions, because advances in the method have been for the most part advances in technique. In the present brief section we will attempt to focus attention on the historical development of an understanding of the adsorption chromatographic process. 

Once upon a time, there was a Mr. Tswett, and many years before him a Mr. Runge, who recognized the adsorption characteristics of lime and paper and. .. , so the story of chromatography starts. The history of chromatography is probably well known, as well as various anecdotes about the subject. Therefore, we will skip it here. 

Also in the history of chromatography, the better is the enemy of the good . During the past decades paper chromatography has been nearly totally superseded by thin layer chromatography (TLC) proposed by E. Stahl [18]. In this... 

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