"Social Studies Connection"

The history of chromatography spans from the nineteenth until the twenty first century and it concerns the separation of mixtures. It is based on different applications and studios in life. This process is useful because you can define the components of the structure that you are looking for, as well as the characteristics of both liquid and solid substances. In addition, it is used for plant pigments to find the chemicals in the leafs.

Chromatography was first developed by the botanist Mikhail Tsvet, a Russian. In 1903, he produced a hue separation of plant pigments through a column of calcium and carbon. He also found another way to separate plant pigments by doing selective absorption and extraction."The discovery of paper chromatography in 1943 by Martin and Synge provided, for the first time, the means of surveying constituents of plants and for their separation and identification. There was an explosion of activity in this field after 1945. New types of chromatography developed during the 1930s and 1940s made the technique useful for many separation processes".

"The first developments in thin layer chromatography occurred in the 1940s, and techniques advanced rapidly in the 1950s after the introduction of relatively large plates and relatively stable materials for sorbent layers. Its process is similar to paper chromatography with the advantage of faster runs, better separations, and the choice between different stationary phases."