BRIEF HISTORY

Dr. James Meinhard was asked in 1973 if he could fabricate a concentric glass nebulizer for the inductively coupled plasma spectrometer, then in its infancy. Patterning his efforts after a century-old design (Gouy 1879) and working in a private shop, Dr. Meinhard drew capillaries and sealed them into prefabricated shells. The resultant MEINHARD® concentric glass nebulizer was found to outperform a cross-flow nebulizer in tests conducted at Ames Laboratory in Iowa and subsequently was selected by a prominent instrument manufacturer as a standard part of its ICP sample introduction system. The first model featured the lapped, coplanar "Type A" nozzle. It remains popular to this day.

In 1983, J E Meinhard Associates, Inc introduced the "Type C" nebulizer which is designed to tolerate samples high in dissolved solids. The argon-conserving low-flow "Type K" followed a year later in a cooperative effort with an instrument manufacturer. The CIR was conceived in 1990 in collaboration with another manufacturer to operate with helium in its mass spectrometer.

Hybrid systems grew popular. In the early 1990's, J E Meinhard Associates Inc offered a small bore (SB) modification in response to demand for reduction in dead volume in HPLC-ICP and other hybrid techniques. The High Efficiency Nebulizer (HEN) was introduced for microsample analysis without loss of detection limits for use in standard ICP systems and FIA- and HPLC-ICP systems.

In 1997, in collaboration with a major university, J E Meinhard Associates, Inc offered a new innovation in direct injection nebulization, the Direct Injection High Efficiency Nebulizer (DIHEN) (US Pat. 6166379). The DIHEN offers the advantages of the HEN with the ability to nebulize the sample directly into the analytical plasma.

In 2002 Analytical Reference Materials International purchased the business, relocated it to Colorado, and expanded the product offering. The company named was changed to Meinhard Glass Products to reflect the expanded product line.

Meinhard Glass Products continues the evolution in nebulizer design. The principle goal is to produce finer, more narrowly sized-dispersed aerosols while maintaining the high quality, low cost and simplicity of design and operation that characterize the MEINHARD® nebulizer.