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

1922

Francis Aston [3] 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."

21st Century

2002

John Fenn [4] and Koichi Tanaka [5] 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

• Wikipedia:Mass spectrometry

• Bristol History of Mass Spectrometry

• Scripps History of Mass Spectrometry