Norris, Karl

Williams, Phil Norris, Karl (eds) Near-Infrared Technology in the Agricultural and Food Industries, 2nd Edition American Associates Cereal Chemists St Paul MN, 2001. 

The first NIR instruments were, in reality, developed for the UV and Vis regions of the spectrum. They were made by seven companies Beckman, Cary (now owned by Varian), Coleman, Perkin-Elmer, Shimadzu, Unicam, and Zeiss. Based on the work of Karl Norris and coworkers in the USDA, the Illinois Department of Agriculture solicited bids from companies to produce a pure NIR instrument, capable of measuring protein, oil, and moisture in soybeans. 

The history of NIR dates back to the studies by Herschel in 1800. The modern NIR analysis was developed in 1950 by the works of a group at USDA (U.S. Department of Agriculture), headed by Karl Norris (101). 

For all of the above reasons, studies of relationships between mineral sites and mineral reactivity would be simplified, and the confidence in the findings increased, if statistically testable methods were to be used to identify key variables and to test hypotheses. Near infrared reflectance analysis (NIRA) is such a method. It was developed by Karl Norris in the 1960 s to quantitate the concentration of key constituents in multicomponent mixtures such as wheat (22). 

The earliest commercial NIR instrumentation was based upon filters. (Karl Norris used a UV/Vis/NIR scanning Cary instrument, although that instrument wasn t designed for NIR, per se.) A filter is a window that allows a particular slice of the spectrum to pass through (a bandpass filter) or blocks all wavelengths below or above a certain frequency (edge and cutoff filters). 

The second advance was software. Prior to software packages supplied by Technicon (now Bran + Leubbe) and Pacific-Scientific (now FOSS-NIRSystems), little was available for calculating analyte concentration. Extraction of analyte into solvents and reading the solution in a cuvette was all that existed until about 1980. Then, Karl Norris developed multivariate equations where several wavelengths were combined in what amounted to a multiterm Beer s law equation. Until the two mentioned vendors released their (nonvalidated) software packages, calculations were basically performed by hand. In addition, equations were not secured validation trails were not made and there was no security in terms of system access. 

It is generally recognized that the history of the application of NIR to the food and agricultural industry began with Karl Norris at the USDA. In fact, Karl Norris work was instrumental in the major renaissance of the NIR spectral region, especially with regard to its application to direct, solids-sampling measurements. 

H. Mark. Qualitative Near-infrared Analysis. In Near-Infrared Technology in the Agriculture and Food Industries, 2nd ed. Phil WiUiams, Karl Norris, co-eds. The American Association of Cereal Chemists, St. Paul, MN, 2001, p. 233-238. 

In the late 1960s, work led by Karl Norris, considered by many to be the father of NIR, demonstrated the potential value of this region for quantitative work by making measurements of agricultural products. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, the then-employer of Mr. Norris, made... 

We are delighted to dedicate this third edition of the Handbook of Near-Infrared Analysis to our good friend and colleague, Karl H. Norris. 

The idea of a spectrometer dedicated to near-IR spectroscopy is relatively recent, and the early commercial near-IR instruments were simply UV-visible (or mid-infrared) spectrometers fitted with an additional detector and occasionally a second grating blazed for the near-IR. This equipment provided the basis for the pioneering work of Kermit Whetzel and Wilbur Kaye, who were largely responsible for laying the foundation of analytical near-IR spectroscopy. The development of modern near-IR instrumentation was spurred by research at the US Department of Agriculture Karl Norris discovered that no commercial spectrometer of the time could provide diffuse reflectance measurements of the quality he required, and developed his own computerized near-IR spectrometer... 

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