5 Apr /16

Pipette

Pipette
Pipette – Word of the day – EVS Translations

Though most of us consider Louis Pasteur the inventor of the pipette, the very first examples date as far back as the late 18th century when the French chemist, pharmacist and inventor Francois Descroizilles developed the alcalimetre, the early precursor to the pipette.

And the word pipette itself has entered the English language before Pasteur was even born, in 1818, as a direct borrowing from French, where pipette was the diminutive form of pipe, which stemmed from the Vulgar Latin pipa. Obviously, the word entered the English language with the meaning of a “small tube”. (There is an isolated 15th century example of the usage of the word to name a small musical pipe).

As a medical laboratory equipment, the term was coined in 1824 by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, who made slight modifications on Descroizilles’ work and used the word pipette in a paper written about indigo solutions.

15 years later, the word was firstly recorded in print, in Andrew Ure’s A dictionary of arts, manufactures, and mines: “We readily obtain a volume of 100 cubic centimetres by means of a pipette.”

When comes to Pasteur, his pipette was a simple glass tube with cotton wadding stuffed into one end, which allowed air to pass in but filtered the microbes. Today the pipette droppers or eye droppers are known as Pasteur pipette, while the phrase term was coined as far back as the end of the 19th century and firstly recorded in print in 1899’s Proceedings of the Royal Society of London: “If it be desired to keep the blood for continuous examination, it should be drawn into a graduated Pasteur pipette”

By that time, scientists started using their mouths to create the vacuum necessary for a pipette to function, but this mouth pipetting method led to many infections, with the first one recorded in a laboratory in 1839 when a physician accidentally sucked a culture of typhoid bacilli.

The first complete patent that can be found was filled in 1924 and diluted blood for sugar testing. It was basically a pipe for measuring the amount of blood sucked out after the sharp end had been inserted into the patient.

In the 1940, following the invention of the plastics, the plastic pipette ruled the industry with its cheap and quick production.

The first micropipette was patented in 1957 by the German Dr Heinrich Schnitger and the commercial production started in 1961. In 1972 the practical pistol-driven air-displacement pipettes were invented and are nowadays colloquially referred to as Gilson in honour of one of the inventors.

The recent boom of technology led to the development of microfluidic pipettes and to the robotisation of pipette calibration, yet the basis instrument to transport a measured volume of liquid stays the same – the “good” old pipette.