Archer Martin

@Chemists, Career and Life ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ Archer John Porter Martin was a British chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1952 Alzheimer's British Scientists Chemists Pisces Celebrities Archer John Porter Martin was a British chemist who received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1952 for the development of modern chromatography technique which helps to separate different compounds in a mixture. He shared the prize with another biochemist, Richard Lawrence Millington Sygne. Before his technique was adopted by others, it had been very difficult to separate the compounds as chemical reactions never produced any clean and pure products. To obtain the compounds in the pure form even repetitive, distillation, crystallization and the extraction of solvents were not sufficient. Though Mikhail Tswett, a Russian-Italian chemist had invented the first method of absorption chromatography in the early twentieth century, the method never became popular. On the other hand Martin invented three different types of chromatography techniques, namely partition, paper and gas-liquid chromatography, which became very popular and are still used today. By the end of 1953 his chromatography technique had spread like wildfire because the academia and the industry had been waiting long for a technique that could separate relatively volatile compounds cleanly and quickly. The oil and the gas companies benefited the most from his discoveries. He acted as a consultant to many firms during the later years of his career.

Personal Details

Birthday: March 1, 1910 Died on: July 28, 2002 Nationality: British Famous: Scientists, Chemists Spouses: Judith Bagenal Known as: Archer John Porter Martin Universities: Peterhouse Cambridge Information Detail Birthday March 1, 1910 Died on July 28, 2002 Nationality British Famous Scientists, Chemists Spouses Judith Bagenal Known as Archer John Porter Martin Universities Peterhouse Cambridge Birth Place London, England Gender Male Father William Archer Porter Martin Mother Lilian Kate Brown Ayling Sun Sign Pisces Born in London, England Famous as Chemist Died at Age 92

London, England

Archer Martin born at Unsplash Birth Place

He married Judith Bagenal in 1943 and had three daughters and two sons from the marriage. Unsplash Personal Life

He had dyslexia till the age of eight and was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease in 1985. He was moved to a nursing home in Llangarron in 1996. Unsplash Personal Life

Archer Martin died on July 28, 2002 at a nursing home in Llangarron in Herefordshire in England. Unsplash Personal Life

Archer Martin was born in Upper Holloway in London on March 1, 1910. Unsplash Childhood & Early Life

His father, William Archer Porter Martin, was an Irish doctor and his mother, Lilian Kate Brown Ayling, was a nurse. He had an elder sister named Nora. Unsplash Childhood & Early Life

The family moved to Bedford in 1920 where Martin attended the Bedford School from 1921 to 1929. Unsplash Childhood & Early Life

He earned a scholarship to study chemical engineering at Peterhouse, Cambridge in 1929. Unsplash Childhood & Early Life

At the insistence of the famous biochemist John Burdon Sanderson Haldane at Cambridge, Marin switched over to biochemistry from chemical engineering. Unsplash Childhood & Early Life

In 1938 Archer Martin took up a biochemist’s job at the ‘Wool Industries and Research Association’ or ‘WIRA’ at Leeds. He continued to build more elaborate concurrent apparatus until he was successful in building one that worked. Unsplash Career

In 1939 Synge also joined him at the WIRA and they were able to develop a partition-chromatographic technique which could successfully separate acelytated amino acids. Unsplash Career

On June 7, 1941, they demonstrated their partition chromatography to the ‘Biochemical Society’ at the ‘National Institute for Medical Research, Hampstead’. Unsplash Career

Martin and Sygne suggested fine particles and high pressures for improving the separation which came to be used in the high-pressure liquid chromatography in the mid 1970s. Unsplash Career

They helped the war effort during the Second World War by inventing a cloth to protect soldiers from mustard gas. Unsplash Career

Archer Martin’s book ‘Separation of Higher Monoamino-Acids by Counter-Current Liquid-liquid Extraction : The Amino-Acid Composition of Wool’ written with Richard L. M. Synge was published in 1941. Unsplash Major Works

The book ‘Qualitative Analysis of Proteins: A Partition Chromatographic Method Using Paper’ written with Raphel Consden and A. Hugh Gordon was published in 1944. Unsplash Major Works

‘Gas-Liquid Partition Chromatography: The Separation and Micro-Estimation of Volatile Fatty Acids from Formic Acid to Dodecanoic Acid’ written in collaboration with Anthony T. James was published in 1952. Unsplash Major Works

Information	Detail
Birthday	March 1, 1910
Died on	July 28, 2002
Nationality	British
Famous	Scientists, Chemists
Spouses	Judith Bagenal
Known as	Archer John Porter Martin
Universities	Peterhouse Cambridge
Birth Place	London, England
Gender	Male
Father	William Archer Porter Martin
Mother	Lilian Kate Brown Ayling
Sun Sign	Pisces
Born in	London, England
Famous as	Chemist
Died at Age	92

Archer Martin

British

Mar 1, 1910

Biography

Personal Details

London, England