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.