Fifty Years of GC Instrumentation

The possibility of gas chromatography (GC) was first mentioned in 1941, in the famous paper by A.J.P. Martin and R.L.M. Synge. When dealing with liquid-liquid partition chromatography, they predicted that Leslie S. Ettre . . . the mobile phase need not be a liquid but may be a vapour. . . . Very refined separations of volatile substances should therefore be possible in a column in which permanent gas is made to flow over gel impregnated with a nonvolatile solvent. (1) However, at that time, nobody picked up this suggestion and it was 10 years until Martin, now with A.T. James, demonstrated the possibility of gas-liquid partition chromatography (2,3). They worked in the biochemical field and demonstrated the application of the technique by separating and quantitatively determining the components of a C1-C12 fatty acid mixture. The importance of GC was recognized almost immediately by petroleum and petrochemical laboratories, which faced the daily challenge of analyzing complex hydrocarbon mixtures. However, the basic difference between liquid chromatography (LC) and GC became apparent: while classical LC could be carried out in the laboratory by practically everybody using the usual laboratory set-ups, GC required components that were not among the standard laboratory equipment of the time. Companies with large research laboratories usually had mechanical shops capable of constructing the required sophisticated systems. Indeed, the first gas chromatographs were built by the major petrochemical laboratories such as Shell or British Petroleum; however, smaller laboratories did not have the means to construct and build their own systems. Therefore, it soon became obvious that the immense potential of GC could only be fully exploited if proper instruments became available.


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