Mass spectrometry timeline
From Mass Spec Terms
19th Century
- 1886
- Eugen Goldstein observes canal rays.
- 1898
- Wilhelm Wien demonstrates that canal rays can be deflected using strong electric and magnetic fields.
20th Century
- 1905
- Joseph John Thomson begins his study of positive rays.
- 1906
Thomson is awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics "in recognition of the great merits of his theoretical and experimental investigations on the conduction of electricity by gases"
- 1919
- Francis Aston constructs the first velocity focusing mass spectrograph with mass resolving power of 130.
- 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."
- '1931
- Ernest O. Lawrence invents the cyclotron.
- 1934
- Josef Mattauch and Richard Herzog develop the double-focusing mass spectrograph.
- 1936
- Arthur J. Dempster develops the spark ionization source.
- 1937
- Aston constructs a mass spectrograph with resolving power of 2000.
- 1939
- Lawrence receives the Nobel Prize in Physics for the cyclotron.
- '1948
- The first commercial mass spectrometer, the Vickers MS-2, is introduced.
- 1989
- Wolfgang Paul receives the Nobel Prize in Physics "for the development of the ion trap technique"
21st Century
- 2002
- John Fenn and Koichi Tanaka 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."
