Capillary Electrophoresis and its Basic Principles in Historical Retrospect Part 1. The Early Decades of the “Long Nineteenth Century”: The Voltaic Pile, and the Discovery of Electrolysis, Electrophoresis and Electroosmosis

Ernst Kenndler,Marek Minárik

doi:10.36253/substantia-1018

Abstract

Here we set forth the first from a series of reports devoted to the history of capillary electrophoresis. In this opening part, we go more than two centuries back in time and revisit original discoveries of electrolysis, electrophoresis and electroosmosis. We emphasize the essential role of a brilliant invention of 1799 by Alessandro Volta, the Voltaic pile, basically the first battery delivering a constant-flow electricity, which has made all the scientific advances in the subsequent years and decades possible. We describe the experiments of William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle revealing electrolytic decomposition of river water followed by enlightened investigations by Nicolas Gautherot, Ferdinand Frédéric Reuss and Robert Porrett that each independently and unaware of the works of the other uncovered the phenomena of electrophoresis and electroosmosis. We give not only a technical description and a chronological overview of the inventive experiments, but offer also some formidable details as well as circumstances surrounding some of the initial inventors and their observations. We conclude this time period, for which we coin the term "1st epoch of electrophoresis", with the same year 1914 as the coinciding period of European history termed the “Long 19th Century”, and accentuate the surprising fact that over this entire cycle of 125 years no attempts were taken to utilize the findings and newly acquired knowledge to perform an electric driven separation of compounds from a mixture. In the field of electrophoresis and electroosmosis, it is rather the epoch of pure than of applied science.

Highlights

We present the first of a series of papers on the history of observations and method development in the field of electrophoresis. In this contribution we take a journey at the outset of what we coin as the “1st epoch of electrophoresis”, which we outline as a period of 125 years between the 1780s and the 1910s
Due to the striking coincidence with the same period of European political history we deliberately choose to borrow the term “Long 19th Century” from the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who coined it for the time from the French revolution in 1789 till the beginning of the First World war in 1914
It has to be recalled that electrophoresis by itself is a drift of charged particles – dispersed in a liquid – under the influence of an electric potential difference

Summary

Introduction

During the 125 years following Galvanis experiments and the invention of Voltas pile electrophoresis was applied solely to study the physical and chemical properties of pure compounds. In this comment Quincke referred to an unpublished lecture entitled “Indicium de novo hucusque nondum cognito effectu electricitatis galvanicae” (“Notice of a new, hitherto unknown effect of galvanic electricity”) which Reuss held in November 1807 before the Physical-Medical Society, Instituted at the Moscow Imperial University of Letters.[51] It should be pointed out, that the first observation of electroosmosis should be attributed to the 1807 work of Reuss,34 Porrett wrote his 1816 paper without any knowledge of its existence.

Results

Conclusion