Working under Ultra High Pressure

Mikhail S. Tswett, a Russian Botanist used a solvent for extracting compounds from leafs in the early 19 tn century. For the separation of the compounds he packed open glass columns with alumina or powdered chalk particles and loaded the leaf extract on the top of the columns. Then he added pure solvent and observed a separation of the compounds according to their and the columns materials physical and chemical properties. Liquid chromatography (LC) was born. Tswett called his development chromatography from the greek words "chroma" for color and "graph" for writing. Maybe the naming was not a coincidence since Tswett is the Russian word for color.