how did you get into chromatography?

[Uwe Neue]

In late 1972 I was looking for a place to get my MS. Based on some discouraging experiences in the organic chemistry lab, I did not think that this was a direction to go. I wanted to get into analytical chemistry – mainly because I wanted to save the world and make it a greener place. However, the department heads in our analytical groups were, let us say, dull. I loved P-Chem, because I could calculate things, and the results were very reproducible, which was the opposite of synthetic chemistry. Then I found in the P-Chem department this new “Institute for High-Performance Liquid Chromatographyâ€

[HW Mueller]

Uwe, this is historically quite interesting. Are you talking about the situation in Germany or generally? The time I got into HPLC is quite nebulous to me now, but I have told the story that we got these first Waters pumps when I was still a doctoral candidate. That would have been before 1973. Can you dig out the introduction time of these pumps? Maybe I used them initially when I was post-docing? Darn.

Since I got into this I might as well mention how I started seriously with chromatography. It was in the late 1960´s, working on a PhD in physical organic chemistry (I also disliked synthetic organic, but had to do much of it anyway, as if someone wanted to punish me for snubbing synthetic). I did some mechanistic work on atomic bromine reactions (free radical chemistry) and got several products. NMR of the mixture was too complicated, which means that the stuff had to be separated. It worked on packed ( by myself) GC columns. Also some of them had to be collected through the thermal conductivity detector, for characterization (for instance H, C analysis in commercial labs). A bunch of DC had to be done also, an attempt to assign geometry via chirality failed. We thought that cellulose plates, covered with a high boiling paraffin (later this would be called reverse phase), would separate optical antipodes, it didn´t, even though they had to be there.
DC was done, of course, for compounds which didn´t want to go through a GC. Quantitatively DC is quite limited so gravity column chromatography became necessary to clean up the compounds I needed. This was no good for analytical work, so we all were very eager to try the new commercial metal columns with small particles as stat. phase. This required a high pressure pump, the first one we got (forgot the manufacturer, but I think they were later bought by Beckman??) was extremely susceptible to all kinds of breakdowns. We removed the covering, never to replace it again, constantly working on the innards.
Then came these super (in our experience) Waters pumps, they really worked, no repairs needed until one of the guys poured some cola over it.
Anyway, to cut the story here: Was that before or after 1973?

[Uwe Neue]

The M6000 was announced in December 1972 and delivered in 1973. We ended up with one of the first serial numbers in our lab (while the rest of us worked with Orlita pumps capable of 250 mL/min and pressure regulators).

[HW Mueller]

Ok, so I must have gotten a bit of work in before the PhD was finished.

Funny, I have worked with an Orlita stainless steel membrane pump, hooked to a flow regulator, the last years.

[bluejay]

I got into Chromatography accidentally - I got a temp job at a bioscience company assembling medical devices, then they needed some help in the lab. I'd never even heard of chromatography when I was asked to put samples and solvents in these funny looking little glass vials with aluminum caps....I learned later that was headspace analysis. That turned into a full time job and somehow for better or worse my jobs since then always seems to somehow involve chromatography.

[offroad]

I was hired just several months back, totally new to chromatography.

We have a fast pyrolysis plant that produces bio-oil from nappier grass. My duty is, besides running the plant, analyse all the products that comes out of this machine, something like 5 gaseous compounds, over 200 liquids and a few solids (ash etc).