The electrokinetic phenomenon was observed for the first time in 1807 by Russian professors Peter Ivanovich Strakhov and Ferdinand Frederic Reuß at Moscow University,[4] who noticed that the application of a constant electric field caused clay particles dispersed in water to migrate.
With more assistance from the Rockefeller Foundation, the expensive Tiselius apparatus was built at a number of major centers of chemical research.
Rather than charged molecules moving freely through solutions, the new methods used solid or gel matrices in new electrophoresis apparatuses to separate compounds into discrete and stable bands or zones.
Zone electrophoresis found widespread application in biochemistry after Oliver Smithies introduced starch gel as an electrophoretic substrate in 1955.
Despite the development of high-resolution electrophoresis methods, the accurate control of parameters such as pore size and stability of polyacrylamide gels was still a major challenge in the 20th century.