Waters Corporation: Fifty Years of Innovation in Analysis and Purification

Robert Leveille, James Waters, and Wilbur Austin with the flame photometer they built for Consolidated Edison, ca. 1959. Courtesy of Waters Corporation

By Patrick D. McDonald

In 1958 James Logan Waters began the right business at the right time. Fifty years later Waters Corporation celebrates its golden jubilee of innovation in the field of analytical chemistry. Landmark liquid chromatography products from the company James Waters founded have transformed the practice of chemistry in the 20th century and continue to lead the way toward solving the significant separation problems of tomorrow. Pat McDonald, a senior fellow in Chemistry Operations at Waters Corporation, offers this look back at the man and the enterprises behind fundamental developments that continue to shape the practice of liquid chromatography today.

James Logan Waters grew up a headstrong and independent child in Lincoln, Nebraska, during the Great Depression. “Once the drought came, everyone suffered,” recalled Waters in an oral history conducted in 2002 by the Chemical Heritage Foundation. Watching how well his parents dealt with those hard times must have forged in their future entrepreneur the strong moral fiber, work ethic, determination, and pleasant nature that have marked his life’s work.

Young Waters’s grades and attitude toward schoolwork steadily improved as he began to realize he had to achieve something meaningful to “feel good about himself.” Excited by a junior high school project that observed local city businesses, Waters remembers, “I’d already decided that I wanted to be in business for myself, but I didn’t know what business to choose. I think there was within me some great desire to do almost a little bit of everything.”

While a high school junior, Waters moved with his family to Framingham, Massachusetts, where his father became treasurer of the B&W Bus Line. By the time he graduated in 1943, Waters had saved $1,000 in earnings from two paper routes, one before dawn and one after school. He pursued his interest in science and math at the nearby Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Soon after admission he entered the initial V-12 Navy College Training Program. Following his second MIT term, he transferred to Columbia University, where three years later, through an accelerated course of study, he earned a degree in both physics and engineering and a commission as a U.S. Navy ensign.

Two terms of humanities study at the University of Nebraska and an unsatisfying stint as an algebra teacher in Lincoln bookended Waters’s final navy tour of duty in the Pacific and his honorable discharge in California in early 1947. An all-day aptitude test for veterans correlated him best with two career groups: professors and ministers. Although Waters confessed, “I am a bit of a preacher,” he was unsure of what to do next and returned to Framingham to look for a job.

James Waters and His Earliest Enterprises

In 1948 one of Waters’s professors at MIT referred him to a contact at Baird Associates, an instrument manufacturer. Despite having no background in instrumentation, Waters was hired as an assistant to the project manager for Baird’s double-beam infrared spectrophotometer, the first of its kind, based on an exclusive license to the design by Norman Wright at the Dow Chemical Company. For organic chemists this instrumental technique proved more powerful than ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy for functional group identification and chemical structure elucidation; it drove the dramatic shift from traditional wet methods to modern instrumental analysis in the systematic identification of organic compounds.

Much to Waters’s disappointment, the management at Baird was not interested in refining the spectrophotometer’s design; it was viewed as a finished product, and the time had come to sell it. Although Baird had the only double-beam spectrophotometer for over two years, the company was nearly put out of business by Perkin Elmer, whose R&D in the meantime resulted in a more compact unit that sold far better. The lesson was not lost on Waters.

In his months working at Baird as a self-described “glorified service man and assembler,” Waters read reports by teams sent into Germany by the U.S. government to uncover the technologies that had been developed by the Axis powers during the war. One account, of Karl Luft’s development of an infrared gas analyzer, captured his imagination. At the time Baird was also making an infrared gas analyzer, but Waters thought Luft’s invention was a more selective detector. Waters decided: “This is my opportunity—all I have to do is reduce the Luft technology to American practice and I’m in business.” He soon found that goal was easier said than met.

He decided to leave Baird and start his own company, J. L. Waters, with the $5,000 he had saved and an additional $14,000 lent to him by family members. He set up shop in the basement of his parent’s house in Framingham, but when he hired his first employee his mother forced him to find new quarters for the business, and he leased an empty room in a local hardware store.

Finally Waters succeeded in his design, and he sold his first infrared analyzer to DuPont. The second unit was purchased by the Naval Research Laboratory for the detection of toxic gases such as carbon monoxide on submarines. He attracted a major ally, Mine Safety Appliances (MSA), by word of mouth in 1949. Wanting to enter the gas analyzer business but having problems in R&D, MSA formed an alliance with Waters’s fledgling company: J. L. Waters, Inc., continued to do the research and manufacturing while MSA sold the products. In 1955 Waters made a shrewd deal to sell his still unprofitable company to MSA for $200,000, 15 years of royalties at 3%, and a three-year contract as a consultant. He used this time to plan his next enterprise, one that would quickly become profitable and live on under his name for many years to come.

The Humble Start of Waters Associates

Waters took his earnings from the sale of J. L. Waters and, in September 1958, established Waters Associates without a product to sell. He rehired five of his former employees—mostly technicians without college degrees—and operated out of a rented space in a former police station. Some early projects included a balloon hydrometer for the U.S. Air Force; a flame photometer for Consolidated Edison; and a conoblender for the Coca-Cola Company. (Specifically, the latter instrument’s purpose was to blend the high-sugar-content, highly viscous Coca-Cola syrup with water while measuring the mixture’s refractive index [RI] to assure uniformity.) Although the process-control instrumentation market wasn’t particularly lucrative, Waters gained valuable experience that made his breakthrough into chromatography possible. At first Waters had licensed his sensitive RI process monitor to MSA, but he wisely acquired it back later. He also lured Larry Maley from MSA to become the first Waters sales manager. Together they embarked in earnest on the refractometer business.

In 1962 John Moore, a polymer chemist at Dow Chemical in Freeport, Texas, was told about the novel design of the Waters refractometer by his engineering colleagues and called the company to request a custom unit with unusual specifications. He wanted a flow cell with one-tenth the standard volume that could operate at 130°C—purportedly for use with orthodichlorobenzene. Waters knew that orthodichlorobenzene was a liquid at room temperature and argued that a smaller volume was not necessary for process control, but Dow’s money talked, and Waters made the modification.

Several months later curiosity consumed Waters, and he sent Maley to Freeport to learn what Moore was doing with his modified refractometer. With patent applications filed just days earlier, Moore was free to describe his homemade instrument and new technique: he had synthesized controlled-porosity cross-linked polystyrene-divinylbenzene beads and packed them into columns. When a dissolved polymer sample was injected into the column, the larger molecules could not penetrate the pores and thus moved more quickly; the smaller molecules entered the pores and therefore took longer to emerge. The resulting chromatogram represented a molecular size distribution of the sample components that could be correlated with their molecular weights. Moore called his process gel permeation chromatography (GPC). His work with synthetic polymers in organic solvents had been inspired by the classic work in Sweden by Jerker Porath and Per Flodin on aqueous gel filtration separations of biopolymers.

Maley immediately proposed that Waters Associates manufacture the system that Moore had conceived. Moore convinced upper management in Midland, Michigan, who favored a much larger firm, to contract with this tiny instrument company, and in January 1963 Waters made a $10,000 down payment on royalties for his exclusive license to the GPC technology. Waters himself went to Moore’s lab for three weeks of fact finding; he learned every aspect of the process, including how to synthesize the polymer beads (later to be sold by Waters Associates under the trademark Styragel), and returned to Framingham filled with ideas on how to construct an improved version of the instrument. Within three months, Waters and his team had built and sold five prototypes of the GPC-100—in essence the first commercial high-pressure liquid chromatography (HPLC) system .

It used to take up to three weeks to get a molecular weight distribution for a single polymer; GPC could achieve the same result in about 90 minutes. Polymer chemists soon saw the potential of this new technology. Maley in turn took note of the issues that GPC users experienced and inaugurated an annual GPC symposium at which successful early adopters and struggling users could learn from each other, thereby fostering best practices, while Waters’s team gleaned R&D ideas from both. (These meetings inspired many similar user forums that continue to this day.) The financial success of the GPC business enabled Waters Associates to move to larger facilities in 1965 and to expand its product line of instruments and column packings over the next decade to all modes of analytical and preparative liquid chromatography.

The B₁₂ Story

The next big break for Waters Associates followed in fall 1970 from a user query: Helmut Hamberger, a postdoctoral fellow in the Harvard University lab of Nobel laureate Robert Burns Woodward, called Waters in frustration to ask for help in separating isomers of key intermediates in the total synthesis of vitamin B₁₂. Waters had no idea who Woodward was, but when his vice president of marketing, James Little, told him about Woodward’s exalted reputation among organic synthetic chemists, Waters concluded he should tackle the problem himself. This market was one he had wanted to penetrate ever since being told in 1968 by a prophetic researcher at Mobil that every organic chemist ought to have a liquid chromatography (LC) system on his or her bench. So he packed some columns, trundled an ALC-100 (a versatile system with both ultraviolet and RI detectors) to Woodward’s lab, and proceeded to solve separation problems.