Hook Up with Instrumentation

During the 1960s computers evolved into more powerful, smaller units and became major components of spectroscopic and spectrometric instruments. Computers did not merely aid in the collection, storage and treatment of data, they sometimes fundamentally changed the very nature of the measurement. 

Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR) had its origins in the interferometer developed by Michelson in 1880 and experiments by astrophysicists some seventy years later. A commercial FTIR instrument required development of the laser (1960, by Theodore H. Maiman [1927- ], Hughes Aircraft), refined optics, and computer hardware and software. The Fourier transform takes data collected in time domain and converts them to frequency domain, the normal infrared (IR) spectrum. FTIR provided vasdy improved signal-to-noise ratios allowing routine analyses of microgram samples. 

The mid-1960s witnessed the marriage between gas chromatography (GC) and mass spectrometry (MS) (see the figure on page 234). Marcel J. E. Golay (1902-89) developed the idea of the capillary (or open-tubular) GC column in 1957. Capillary GC, capable of extremely 

Mass spectrometry data are readily digitized and libraries of mass spectral data for individual substances could be stored on computer tapes. Iflaus Biemann (1926- ), at MIT, had accumulated a library of 8,000 mass 

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