Abstract
There is no question that the field of analytical chemistry has had a profound beneficial effect on society during the 19th and 20th centuries. The painstaking and often painfully frustrating work by analytical chemists is the stuff of which Nobel Prizes are made. Nonetheless, the engineering community must often remind these highly dedicated researchers that the original invention is frequently only the tip of the iceberg on the road from origin to commercialization. This article traces the history of the engineering development related to the several generations of ion chromatography instruments, columns, suppressers, and software. In so doing, several representative engineering challenges and their outcomes are discussed including: early directions (traveling without a road map, or going where the applications are), dealing with an extremely corrosive mobile phase (aka: the eluent), resolving the inherent incompatibilities of nonmetallic flow paths with the benefits of high-pressure, elevated tempe...
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