The Rise of Voltammetry: From Polarography to the Scanning Electrochemical Microscope

This Waters Symposium celebrates the development of analytical instrumentation in the general area of electrochemistry and, more precisely, in the area of voltammetric instrumentation (broadly defined). In this article, I deal with the origins of the field, that is, the invention of polarography, and the development of commercial instrumentation, to about 1950. This allows a discussion of the pioneering work of Heyrovsky and the Czech school that formed the basis for all that followed. I then skip ahead to the last 15 years and talk about the scanning electrochemical microscope (SECM), which represents one of the current frontier electrochemical instruments. Since our group at Texas was a major contributor to this technique, this allows a detailed personal account of the work and ideas that led to the SECM as well as some brief comments on the future of this field. I will also attempt to show how earlier work and techniques led, in both cases, to the invention of polarography and SECM. I leave to the othe...