HP for High Performance or High Pressure LC????

[JesseG]

Maybe some one knows the root of this debate. Does HPLC designate High Performance LC or High Pressure LC?

In our debate one side maintains that it was originally Pressure but that has morphed into Performance. If it is performance wouldn't that then mean that LPLC is Low Performance and GPC is Good Performance???

Older references all refer to it is as High Pressure yet newer references call it High Performance.
Any comments?

[Consumer Products Guy]

Yipes, you guys must have a lower workload than I do.....my old-timer here says that it was first "high pressure" then became "high performance". But Hewlett-Packard (before Agilent) liked to claim (tongue in cheek) that HPLC was "Hewlett-Packard Liquid Chromatography".

[Uwe Neue]

I always thought that it was high-pleasure LC. However, it is possible that the person who taught me this was not from the US...

[tom jupille]

I thought it was high-price liquid chromatography.

[Mark Tracy]

Or as one frustrated grad student told me "Highly Problematic Liquid Chromatography" after being unable to decontaminate his detector for a week.