Historical developments instrumentation

The immense growth in the luminescence literature during the period between these two reviews had little to do with developments in fundamental theory. It was mainly due to the availability of new instrumentation, such as the photomultiplier (around 1950), the laser (around 1960), transistor and microcircuit electronics (around 1970), and ready access to laboratory computers (around 1975). All aspects of luminescence theory now being used to interpret luminescence measurements have been known since the early 1900 s and nearly all of the types of measurements now being made had been initiated with cruder techniques by 1930. We discuss here many of the latest techniques in luminescence analysis with selected highlights from the historical development of luminescence and a look at several recent developments in luminescence applications that appear likely to be important to future research. 

The historical development of titration calorimetry has been addressed by Grime [197]. The technique is credited to have been born in 1913, when Bell and Cowell used an apparatus consisting of a 200 cm3 Dewar vessel, a platinum stirrer, a thermometer graduated to tenths of degrees, and a volumetric burette to determine the end point of the titration of citric acid with ammonia lfom a plot of the observed temperature change against the volume of ammonia added [208]. The capabilities of titration calorimetry have enormously evolved since then, and the accuracy limits of modern titration calorimeters are comparable to those obtained in conventional isoperibol (chapter 8) or heat-flow instruments (chapter 9) [195,198],... 

However, an encyclopaedia focusing on instruments, which includes material on chemical instruments and apparatus, was published in 1998. It incorporates 327 entries on a diverse range of historical items.4 Its strengths are its fairly comprehensive coverage and inclusion of more recent and complex instruments. Descriptions of the historical development of each item are necessarily short. Though it does not concentrate particularly on chemistry, there is some useful material to be found in a German volume of 37 essays, including a chapter on a subject rarely treated, industrial reaction vessels.5... 

FIGURE 1 The historical (development of the three main types of (dye lasers used as scientific instruments today. The year of introduction in the literature is shown of ideas discussed in this text, along with an indication of the types of pump lasers predominately in use and the output specifications available from each type of dye laser. 

This book is intended as an introduction to the basic methods and instrumentation of spectroscopy, with special emphasis placed on laser spectroscopy. The examples in each chapter illustrate the text and may suggest other possible applications. They are mainly concerned with the spectroscopy of free atoms and molecules and are, of course, not complete, but have been selected from the literature or from our own laboratory work for didactic purposes and may not represent the priorities of publication dates. For a far more extensive survey of the latest publications in the broad field of laser spectroscopy, the reader is referred to the proceedings of various conferences on laser spectroscopy [1-11] and to textbooks or collections of articles on modem aspects of laser spectroscopy [12-32]. Since scientific achievements in laser physics have been pushed forward by a few pioneers, it is interesting to look back to the historical development and to the people who influenced it. Snch a personal view can be found in [33, 34]. The reference list at the end of the book might be helpful in finding more details of a special experiment or to dig deeper into theoretical and experimental aspects of each chapter. A useful Encyclopedia of spectroscopy [35, 36] gives a good survey on different aspects of laser speclroscopy. 

Event-controlled thermal analysis techniques have repeatedly been reviewed [195,196]. Rouquerol [7] has traced the historical development of the method. Event-control has been implemented in control algorithms in commercial thermoanalyti-cal instrumentation under various brand names. The introduction of high-resolution TGA instruments has enabled more accurate quantifications of minor weight loss events to be made, e.g. to quantify the amount of residual monomer in PMMA. 

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