History of The Modern Day Test Strip
In many cultures urine was once regarded as a mystical fluid, and in some cultures it is still regarded as such to this day. Its uses have included wound healing, stimulation of the body’s defences, and examinations for diagnosing the presence of diseases.
It was only towards the end of the 18th century that doctors interested in chemistry turned their attention to the scientific basis of urinalysis and to its use in practical medicine.
- 1797 - Carl Friedrich Gärtner (1772–1850) expressed a wish for an easy way of testing urine for disease at the patient’s bedside.
- 1797 - William Cumberland Cruikshank (1745–1800) described for the first time the property of coagulation on heating, exhibited by many urines.
- 1827 - English physician Richard Bright describes the clinical symptom of nephritis in “Reports of Medical Cases.”
- 1840 - The arrival of chemical urine diagnostics aimed at the detection of pathological urine constituents
- 1850 - Parisian chemist Jules Maumené (1818–1898) develops the first “test strips” when he impregnated a strip of merino wool with “tin protochloride” (stannous chloride). On application of a drop of urine and heating over a candle the strip immediately turned black if the urine contained sugar.
- 1883 - English physiologist George Oliver (1841–1915) markets his “Urinary Test Papers”
- approx. 1900 - Reagent papers become commercially obtainable from the chemical company of Helfenberg AG.
- 1904 - A test for the presence of blood by a wet-chemical method using benzidine became known.
- approx. 1920 - Viennese chemist Fritz Feigl (1891–1971) publishes his technique of “spot analysis".
- 1930s - Urine diagnostics makes major progress as reliability improves and test performance becomes progressively easier.
- 1950s - Urine test strips in the sense used today were first made on industrial scale and offered commercially.
- 1964 - The company Boehringer Mannheim, today a top leader on the world market under the name of Roche, launched its first Combur test strips. Even though the test strips have changed their external appearance little since the 1960s, they now contain a number of revolutionary innovations. New impregnation techniques, more stable colour indicators, and the steady improvement in colour gradation have all contributed to the fact that the use of urine test strips has now become established in clinical and general practice as a reliable diagnostic instrument. The parameter menu offered has steadily grown longer in the intervening decades.
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