The History of Chromatography

Chromatography seems to have been around for a long time in its current state, so it is difficult to believe that the first reported work naming and using chromatography was just over 100 years ago. Mikhail Semenovich Tswett (1872-1919) was born in a small town in Italy but grew up in Switzerland with his father. In later life, he went on to study botany at university in Geneva and, by 1896, he had completed the work and write-up for his doctoral thesis, for which he carried out work on the structure of the plant cell, chloroplasts, and the movement of protoplasm. 

In 1896, he moved to Russia to join his father, but Tswett had difficulty finding the academic position for which he had wished. He accepted a temporary position in a laboratory and completed work for a magisters degree in order to gain the qualification to apply for academic positions in Russia. During this research, he started building the foundations to develop chromatography as a technique. 

Tswett s research involved the isolation of chlorophyll from plant material. Whilst carrying out his work, he found a difference in polar and nonpolar solvents as to how well the isolation occurred. He concluded that this 

From this point, Tswett went on to investigate more than 100 materials of organic and inorganic natures that might have been used as adsorbents. He presented his work in 1903, but he did not provide full details until he completed further work, which resulted in two fundamental papers in 1906 in the Bulletin of the German Botanical Society. This was the first time that chromatography was mentioned. 

the work carried out by Tswett was not accepted by his peers. However, within 10 years of his death, the significance of the technique was realised and many applications were found across the sciences. Although some scientists ridiculed the work of Tswett, others used his findings to apply chromatography in their work (e.g., Leroy Sheldon-Palmer, Archer Martin, and Richard Synge). 

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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 ... 

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... 

This chapter will first cover the nature of electrophoretic separations, especially those concerning capillary electrophoresis. Comprehensive multidimensional separations will then be defined, specifically in terms of orthogonality and resolution. The history of planar and non-comprehensive electrodriven separations will then be discussed. True comprehensive multidimensional separations involving chromatography and capillary electrophoresis will be described next. Finally, the future directions of these multidimensional techniques will be outlined. 

Wong MW (2003) Quantum-Chemical Calculations of Sulfur-Rich Compounds. 231 1-29 Wrodnigg TM, Eder B (2001) The Amadori and Heyns Rearrangements Landmarks in the History of Carbohydrate Chemistry or Unrecognized Synthetic Opportunities 215 115-175 Wyttenbach T, Bowers MT (2003) Gas-Phase Confirmations The Ion Mobility/Ion Chromatography Method. 225 201-226... 

M. Regert, Investigating the history of prehistoric glues through gas chromatography mass spectrometry, Journal of Separation Science, 27, 244 254 (2004). 

The history of thin-layer chromatography has been the subject of a book.158 The first separations on thin layers were performed in 1938. A gas was first used as the mobile phase in adsorption chromatography by Erica Cremer in Innsbruck in 1946. Using hydrogen as carrier gas, she and her student, Fritz Prior, successfully separated air and carbon dioxide using charcoal as the adsorbent. A newly-opened branch of the Deutches Museum in Bonn, devoted to post 1945 developments, has a display featuring the work of Cremer and Prior, with a model of their original apparatus.159... 

A critical review of the history of the ion-pair concept indicates that considerations other than electrostatic were scarcely provided by model makers. Clearly, for chromatography, solvophobic interactions usually neglected by ion-pair model makers are aucial. Chromatographers involved in ion-pair strategies realized that the theoretical description of the ion-pair was critical at the time of the ion-pair chromatography introduction in the late 1970s and subsequently, the electrostatic model of ion association dominated scientific debate. 

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