Mikhail Tsvet

Mikhail Tsvet, a botanist studying plant pigments, poured leaf extracts through glass columns packed with chalk powder in the early 1900s and watched them separate into coloured bands. He called the method chromatography, from the Greek for colour writing. It was largely ignored until the 1930s, but chromatography in its many forms is now a standard way to separate and identify substances in almost every laboratory.