Mikhail
Tswett
invented chromatography in 1901 during his research on plant pigments.
He used the technique to separate various plant pigments such
as chlorophylls,
xanthophylls and
carotenoids.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Tsvet
The method was described on
30 December 1901 at the XI Congress of Naturalists and Physicians (XI
съезд
естествоиспытателей
и врачей) in St. Petersburg. The
first printed description was in 1903, in the Proceedings of the Warsaw
Society of Naturalists, biology section. He first used the term
"chromatography" in print in 1906 in his two papers about
chlorophyll in the German botanical journal, Berichte der Deutschen
botanischen Gesellschaft. In 1907 he demonstrated his chromatogaph for the
German Botanical Society.
Tsvet's work was ignored for
several decades because of diverse reasons: the tragic events in Russia at
the beginning of the 20th century, the fact that Tsvet originally published
only in Russian (what made his results inaccessible to western scientists)
and an article denying Tsvet's findings. Willstater and Stoll tried to repeat
Tsvet's experiments but because they used an aggressive adsorbent (what
destroys the chlorophyll's) were not able to do so. They published their
results and Tsvet's chromatography method went into oblivion. It was
recollected 10 years after his death thanks to German scientist Edgar Lederer
and Austrian biochemist Richard Kuhn and the work of Martin and Synge.