45 Years of Developing Raman Instrumentation: Cadillacs to Big Macs

At Northwestern University under the tutelage of Rick Van Duyne I was able to work with the state-of-the-art Raman systems. They were big and slow with acquisitions times of 20 minutes for a decent Raman spectrum. A taste of what was to come happened when Rick bought 3 Apple IIEs when they first came out and I was tasked with learning 6502 machine code. I had become an instrument person. I went on to the ETH in Zurich and built more systems and learned Pascal. The biggest event for me was in 1994 a serial entrepreneur, Gene Watson (Spectra Physics, Quanta Ray, Coherent, ...) convinced me to cofound Detection Limit and I continued down the Raman instrumentation path creating the Solution Series Raman systems. In 1998 I cofounded Delta and as soon as we had enough funding, we hired an electrical engineer, Mark Watson, and mechanical engineer, Shane Buller. This team really began shaping the Raman world with the under $10,000 Advantage Raman systems and the first handheld Raman system, Inspector. It was at DeltaNu that I met Dave Schiering and together we developed the Smiths Detection Responder. My next adventure, MKS Technology (Mark, Keith, Shane), began with lessons learned from the previous businesses and the advent of commercial black silicon detectors. These new, very sensitive CCDs made Raman easier and sensitive -- to the point of millisecond acquisitions. This gain in sensitivity made ideas like pre-acquisitions to determine parameters before the measurement possible. Raman now really became like photography's point and shoot. At this time, we again started working again with Dave Schiering only now Smiths Detection wanted to license our instrument, that was the beginning of the ACE-ID. In 2016 MKS, now Snowy Range Instruments, became global with the acquisition by Metrohm AG. Once again nagged by a desire for miniaturization and new markets in 2022 we founded SKM Instruments (Shane, Keith, Mark) to make a wearable device to measure nutrition.