ABSTRACT
The aforementioned formulation reveals that it happened more or less coincidentally, when the background of the discovery was mentioned in the inventor’s ‘rst review on CPEs [2] and, some years later, revealed fully in his monograph [3]. Therein, on page 280, one can read as follows:
… Carbon paste electrodes developed from an attempt to prepare a ©uid of suspended carbon particles to be used in the sense of a dropping electrode for anodic oxidations. Such a mixture can be prepared and dropped from a capillary of internal bore slightly greater that that of the DME. However, the conditions for successful operation of the dropping carbon paste electrode are far from ideal, and it soon became apparent that a thicker paste, packed in a pool con‘guration and used either stationary or rotated, would be far more advantageous …
Finally, these circumstances were also con‘rmed by Theodore Kuwana, Adams’s former student [4,5], the author of a special foreword in this book, and one of the ‘rst electrochemists who had ever worked with carbon paste. During a short meeting with the authors a decade ago [6], he said that he was “the slave” who had been working in the laboratory with the dropping carbon electrode (DCE) during the experimental testing of this device, as well as with the very ‘rst carbon paste mixtures made afterward. Despite some initial optimism (see the Adams’s concluding words in his pioneering report [1]), the whole concept of the DCE failed; nevertheless, the unsuccessful work with ©uid graphite suspensions had resulted in an unexpected side product-the carbon paste. In addition, the mixtures of this consistency soon became so popular that carbon pastes as such represented the classic electrode material for laboratory preparations of electrodes, sensors, and detectors of innumerable types, sizes, and con‘gurations.
