History of Chromatography - Refining The Techniques

Refining The Techniques

Martin, in collaboration with Anthony T. James, went on to develop gas chromatography (the principles of which Martin and Synge had laid out in their landmark 1941 paper) beginning in 1949. In 1952, during his lecture for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry (shared with Synge, for their earlier chromatography work) Martin announced the successful separation of a wide variety of natural compounds by gas chromatography. (German chemist Fritz Prior had achieved limited success with gas chromatography, separating oxygen and carbon dioxide, in 1947 during his Ph.D. research. The method of Martin and James, however, became the basis for subsequent developments in gas chromatography.)

The ease and efficiency of gas chromatography for separating organic chemicals spurred the rapid adoption of the method, as well as the rapid development of new detection methods for analyzing the output. The thermal conductivity detector, described in 1954 by N. H. Ray, was the foundation for several other methods: the flame ionization detector was described by J. Harley, W. Nel, and V. Pretorius in 1958, and James Lovelock introduced the electron capture detector that year as well. Others introduced mass spectrometers to gas chromatography in the late 1950s.

The work of Martin and Synge also set the stage for high performance liquid chromatography, suggesting that small sorbent particles and pressure could produce fast liquid chromatography techniques. This became widely practical by the late 1960s (and the method was used to separate amino acids as early as 1960).