Mass spectrometry timeline

19th Century

1886

Eugen Goldstein [1] observes canal rays.

1898

Wilhelm Wien [2] demonstrates that canal rays can be deflected using strong electric and magnetic fields.

20th Century

1905

J. J. Thomson [3] begins his study of positive rays.[4]

1919

Francis Aston [5] constructs the first velocity focusing mass spectrograph with mass resolving power of 130 (Aston, F. W. A positive-ray spectrograph. Phil. Mag. 1919, 38, 707-715).

1922

Aston is awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry "for his discovery, by means of his mass spectrograph, of isotopes, in a large number of non-radioactive elements, and for his enunciation of the whole-number rule."

1937

Aston constructs a mass spectrograph with resolving power of 2000.

21st Century

2002

John Fenn [6] and Koichi Tanaka [7] are awarded one-quarter of the Nobel Prize in chemistry each "for the development of soft desorption ionisation methods ... for mass spectrometric analyses of biological macromolecules."

External Links

• Bristol History of Mass Spectrometry

• Measuring Mass: From Positive Rays to Proteins by Michael A. Grayson (Editor)

• Scripps History of Mass Spectrometry

• Wikipedia:Mass spectrometry