Abraham Savitzky

Who was Abraham Savitzky?

Abraham Savitzky was an American analytical chemist.

He received his bachelor’s degree from the New York State College for Teachers in 1941. After serving in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, he obtained a master’s degree in 1947 and a Ph.D. in 1949 in physical chemistry from Columbia University. While at Columbia, he co-invented the Savitzky-Halford ratio recording spectrophotometer, which was manufactured by Perkin-Elmer as the Model 13. In 1950, after working at Columbia for a year as a research associate in electron microscopy, he began a long career with the Perkin-Elmer Corporation, where was hired by Vincent J. Coates. Savitzky started with Perkin-Elmer as a staff scientist who was chiefly concerned with the design and development of infrared instruments. He rapidly moved up the ranks in the corporation. By 1956 he was named Perkin-Elmer’s new product coordinator for the Instrument Division, and as the years passed, he continued to gain more and more recognition for his work in the company. Most of his work with Perkin-Elmer focused on computer-aided analytical chemistry, data reduction, infrared spectroscopy, time-sharing systems, and computer plotting. He retired from Perkin-Elmer in 1985, where he had worked for 35 years, the last 10 as a principal scientist. After his retirement Savitzky became the president of Silvermine Resources, which was concerned mostly with microprocessor-based computing systems for analytical instrumentation and bibliographic information retrieval, where he remained for several years.