Introduction to Environmental Data Acquisition - Fundamentals of Environmental Sampling and Analysis - page 8

techniques is a little arbitrary and ever changing as technology advances and many
instruments continue to be modernized. For example, the analytical balance was, for a
long time, considered to be the sophisticated instrument. With today's standards,
however, those early balances were rather crude. Many of such yesterday's sop-
histicated instruments have become today's routine analytical tools. They are essential
and continued to be improved and modernized (Rouessac and Rouessac, 1992).
Table 1.1 is a chronological listing of selected analytical instrumentations. In
general, volumetric and gravimetric methods (wet chemicals) are the classical
methods. Spectrometric, electrometric, and chromatographic methods are good
examples of modern analytical instrumentation. Today's environmental analyses
rely heavily on modern instrumentations. This, however, does not imply that
classical methods will be vanished anytime soon. As can be seen, analytical
instrumentations have become increasingly sophisticated to meet the analytical
challenge. The advancement has made it possible to detect what would not had been
detected in the past.
In the 1950s gravimetric methods were primarily used to estimate analyte's
mass and concentration by precipitation, infiltration, drying, and/or combustion.
Although gravimetric methods were sufficient, colorimetric and spectroscopic
methods offered a greater precision. Wet-chemistry-based methods were developed
that altered the spectroscopic properties of chemicals such as DDT and made these

Table 1.1 Selected milestones for analytical instrumentations

Year Instrument

1870 First aluminum beam analytical balance by Florenz Sartorius

1935 First commercial pH meter invented by Arnold O. Beckman

1941 First UV-VIS spectrophotometer (Model DU) by Arnold O. Beckman

1944 First commercial IR instrument (Model 12) by Perkin-Elmer

1954 Bausch and Lomb introduced the Spectronic 20 (still used today in teaching)

1955 First commercial GC produced by the Burrell Corp (Kromo-Tog),

Perkin-Elmer (Model 154), and Podbielniak (Chromagraphette)

1956 First spectrofluorometer by Robert Bowman

1956 First commercial GC/MS using time-of-flight (Model 12-101) by Bendix Corp.

1963 First commercially successful AA (Model 303 AA) by Perkin-Elmer

1963 First commercial NMR from a German company Bruker

1965 First true HPLC was built by Csaba Horv´th at Yale University

1969 First commercially available FI-IR (FTS-14) introduced by Digilab

1970 First commercial graphite furnace AA by Perkin-Elmer

1974 First ICP-OES became commercially available

1977 First commercial LC-MS produced by Finnigan (now Thermo Finnigan)

1983 First commercial ICP-MS (Elan 250) by MDS Scix

AA¼atomic absorption spectroscopy; ICP¼inductively coupled plasma; OES¼optical emission
spectroscopy; IR¼infrared spectroscopy; FT-IR¼ fourier transform infrared spectroscopy;
NMR¼nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. See also Appendix A for a more detailed list of
abbreviations and acronyms used in this text.