Mikhail Tswett had tested more than 100 powders for how strongly they held leaf pigments. He packed one of the best, calcium carbonate, into narrow glass tubes and poured a leaf extract through.
As solvent flowed, the pigments separated into colored bands down the column, each moving at its own rate. Tswett named the result a chromatogram, from the Greek for color writing, and the method chromatography. He described it in two papers in 1906.
The method was largely ignored until 1931, when Edgar Lederer revived it in Richard Kuhn's laboratory in Heidelberg. Modern HPLC still works on Tswett's principle. A detector records each separated component as a peak, and a purity figure is the main peak's share of the total peak area.
Read the original study
Tswett, Berichte der Deutschen Botanischen Gesellschaft, 1906
HPLC peaks trace back to Tswett's column.
Source
- Tswett, M. (1906). Physikalisch-chemische Studien über das Chlorophyll. Die Adsorptionen. Berichte der Deutschen Botanischen Gesellschaft, 24, 316–323.