The first ink jet printer

The earliest significant technical work on piezoelecttic ink jet began in the 1930s and the first tme commercial activity was begun in the late 1960s. This early development effort, aimed at office printing appHcations, had limited commercial success. The first successful piezoelecttic ink-jet printer was introduced in 1977. It printed a relatively cmde character set using an array of 12 jets in its printhead. 

An altemahve approach is the "mass-sensing" multianalyte microarray immunoassay first described by researchers at Beckman Coulter, Fullerton, CA (Silzel et al., 1998). As early as 1991, other groups at Beckman Coulter had adapted commercially available ink-jet printers (e.g., the Hewlett Packard Deskjet) for deposihng oligonucleohdes or proteins such as streptavidin onto substrates to create arrays (Matson, xmpublished data). Piezoelectric... 

Biomolecular arrays can be generated by the print-and-peel method [96]. Here, first an ink-jet printer is aligned to a parylene template with nanoscale openings. After printing, the parylene is peeled off to reveal uniformly patterned nanoscale features. Combinatorial nanoarrays can be patterned by performing a second print run superimposed over the first print. 

Kelvin s ink jet printer was a continuous system, as were the medical monitoring devices that were the first mass-manufactured, commercial form of the technology... 

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