With the Drop of Mercury to the Nobel Prize

Foreword: Voltammetry in environmental chemistry

“…Voltammetry has been a key tool in the development of the field of analytical chemistry and subsequently environmental chemistry. Voltammetry's genesis was from the fundamental electrochemical works of Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, Hermann Helmholtz and Walther Nernst among others, but it's real application to chemistry was with the invention of polarography in 1922 by Jaroslav Heyrovský, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1959 [1] (For a complete historical and future perspective on polarography see the recent articles by Michael Heyrovský. [2,3] ) As polarography progressed under Heyrovský's tutelage it also saw the first application of the method of standard additions by Hans Hohn, [4] a technique that is now common place in a wide range of analytical techniques.…”