Archer John Porter Martin
From TheLiquidPhase
Archer John Porter Martin (1 March 1910 in London - 28 July 2002) was a British chemist. He shared the 1952 Nobel prize in chemistry with Richard Laurence Millington Synge for the development of partition chromatography. His acceptance speech at the Nobel Foundation is a wonderful read about the early history of partition-based purifications: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1952/martin-lecture.html
He was primarily a biochemist, and in his investigations in Vitamins E and B2 developed techniques that laid the foundation for chromatography. He developed partition chromatography while working on the separation of amino acids, and later developed gas-liquid chromatography. It is his earlier work that layed much of the foundation for modern Countercurrent Chromatography. A quote from his Nobel reception speech: "In industry the use of the countercurrent principle led to great economies in heat and solvents, and its value was obvious: in the laboratory such economies are of comparatively little importance" Martin noted the solvent economy of liquid-liquid extraction, which becomes ever more significant, even in the laboratory. Partition chromatography as envisioned by Martin, is something distinctly different than modern CCC. In Martin's words, "Partition chromatography resulted from the marrying of two techniques, that of [Tswett's adsorption-based] chromatography and that of countercurrent solvent extraction."
Whereas in countercurrent chromatography (including HSCCC, CPC, DCCC, etc.), both the liquid and stationary phases are totally liquid, in Martin's "Partition chromatography", the liquid stationary phase was immobilized on a solid support. His later work was largely in adsorption chromatography and a focus on chromatographic resolution, and was instrumental in development of HPLC and GC. It was in his earlier work, in the early 1930s, when tasked with purification of Vitamin E, that he built an apparatus that,
"consisted of a twenty litre aspirator bottle placed on the flat roof of the building, connected at its bottom tubulure by means of a half inch glass tube with a twenty litre bottle. The bottom vessel was filled with ether, the top with the soap solution. This was set up in the afternoon and by the next morning the liquids had interchanged their position. Experiment showed that there was an extraction efficiency corresponding to about ten theoretical plates."
If only Martin could have seen a modern J-type centrifuge!
(All quotes from his Nobel receptance speech: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1952/martin-lecture.html)