The
history of chromatography spans from the mid-19th century to the 21st.
Chromatography, literally "color writing", was used—and named— in the first decade of the 20th century, primarily for the separation of plant
pigments such as
chlorophyll (which is green) and
carotenoids (which are orange and yellow). New forms of chromatography developed in the 1930s and 1940s made the technique useful for a wide range of
separation processes and
chemical analysis tasks, especially in
biochemistry.