The Real Story of How NIR Spectroscopy Happened
Paul Wilks
Wilks Enterprises, Inc.
140 Water Street
Norwalk, CT 06854

At the time of the introduction of the Perkin-Elmer Model 21 Double Beam Infrared Spectrometer, circa 1952, I had the sales responsibility for the Eastern US and all of Canada.

On one of my sales trips that took me through New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania into Maryland, I stopped in at the US Department of Agriculture Experimental Station at Beltsville. I was following up on an inquiry I had received from Dr. Carl Norris at the Station. As I recall, he occupied rather cramped quarters that were dominated by a very large Cary Ultraviolet Spectrometer.

“I’m interested in applying spectroscopy to the analysis of food stuffs” Carl told me. “I think there should be a lot of useful information in the infrared portion of the spectrum.”

“My Cary instrument has an extended range that gets me to about 2 microns” he went on, “but I’d really like to acquire a Model 21 so that I can study foods in the fundamental region it covers”. Carl added that government funds were very limited at the time and it was doubtful that he could get budgetary approval for the eleven thousand dollars that would cover the cost of the Model 21.

Carl didn’t get the money to acquire his Model 21 and this result had both bad and good consequences: Bad because it was to be a number of years before the mid-infrared was to be studied in detail for food analysis – mostly by spectroscopists at McGill University in Montreal. But it was good because Carl was forced to use the equipment he had and very quickly became aware that the NIR region of the spectrum could be very useful for a variety of applications.

Carl Norris’ work opened up this hitherto neglected region of the spectrum and helped spark a whole new industry. One wonders if this would have happened if he had been able to acquire his Model 21!