ABSTRACT
Besides cooking and food processing, surfactant preparation is probably one of the earliest chemical reactions by mankind. The preparation of usable soap was done by heating fresh ashes mixed with animal fat. It may look odd to compare doing laundry with chromatography. However, laundry can be regarded as a separation method: in the process, soaps are used to separate soil and dirt from linen fibers. The history of the development of MLC is not that old. MLC can be considered as the offspring of ion-pair chromatography which appeared in the sixties. MLC itself was introduced as a chromatographic technique using micellar mobile phases in the late seventies by Daniel W. Armstrong [1]. He and others developed and promoted the MLC technique in the eighties. Since it is important to know the basics of ion-pair chromatography to understand the MLC birth and development, the history and principles of ion-pair chromatography are briefly reviewed before the exposition of MLC history.
