Editorial

85th Birthday of Marcel J. E.Golay

Marcel Golay is a remarkable man with a very versatile mind who thinks over a very wide range of scientific and technological areas.

By training a mathematician and electronic engineer, he contributed new concepts in these fields and brought most of them to fruit ion, as valuable practical tools, often spark- ing off fundamental advances in technique.

It is his work in gas chromatography, however, with which we are primarily concerned in this context at the 85th anni- versary of his birthday.

Fairly late on in his career, in his middle fifties, he turned his attention to the newly fledged technique of gas liquid chromatography that had developed so rapidly and spectac- ularly fol lowing the pioneering work of Martin and James from 1951 onwards.

Even as early as 1956, columns had stabilized as quarter inch diameter glass or metal tubes carefully packed accord- ing to a variety of specifications with diatomaceous earth with which the involatile stationary phase was mixed. Sep- aration capabilities were very impressive relative to analyt- ical disti l lation and the specialists in gas chromatography considered ten thousand plates a good performance. The best plate efficiency with such packed columns of th i r ty thousand plates achieved by R. P. W. Scott in 1958 was heralded as a major step forward.

About the same time, Golay became intrigued by the mathematics of the separation process in packed columns, and in order to make his analysis tractable, he constructed in his mind a model of the packing composed of a bundle of parallel capillaries. His first paper created no interest at all, but was a very ingenious consideration of the separation process using the Telegraphers Equation for transmission lines in electrical practice with their distribution capacity, inductance and resistance to simulate the continuing se- paration process in his model.

It was only a short step to the beautiful ly elegant concept of the capillary column and in 1958 at that wonderful Symposium in Amsterdam, he submitted the complete treatment of capillary columns of both round and flat cross

section. I was the editor for this Symposium and Marcel and myself had quite a struggle together getting the printed version of the paper straight for the proceedings.

Once again, even this treatise would have had litt le impact, but in those days I insisted that the actual presentation at the Symposium should contain late new material. This duly emerged in the form of two chromatograms determined on capillary columns with a quarter of a millimetre bore. In the second the xylene isomers had been separated easily on a non-polar stationary phase with over f i f ty thousand plates. I well remember the gasps of astonishment from the audience at this fantastic performance that was to change the whole technology of gas chromatography over the next decade. We were all enraptured by the elegant simplicity of Marcel's concept and I could not wait to dash of f to my laboratory to start experiments with this wonderful new tool !

In some ways it is strange that Marcel did not actively pur- sue his entry into gas chromatography once it became clear that he had originated a break in the practice that, with hindsight, is undoubtedly second only in importance to Archer Martin's original concept of gas liquid chromatog- raphy in 1941.

Marcel is one of the more interesting pioneers I have met over a lifetime of contact with chromatography. Always ebullient, ready for an argument on any significant topic, some of his discussions in open session with Archer Martin are still a memory I treasure.

I am sure that all practising gas chromatographers would wish me to offer on their behalf our congratulations on hav- ing reached the ripe old age of 85 years and to thank him for conceiving the modern capillary column.

D. H. Desty

Chromatographia Vol. 23, No. 5, May 1987 319