Photographs from the Papers of Robert E. Finnigan

Robert E. Finnigan was born on May 27, 1927 in Buffalo, NY. Finnigan graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1949 and later enrolled at the University of Illinois, earning his Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering in 1954 and his Ph.D. in 1957. Finnigan held various positions at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and Stanford Research Institute before becoming Director of the Scientific Instruments Division of Electronic Associates Inc. (EAI) in 1963. While at EAI, Finnigan built quadrupole mass spectrometers for the company’s various clientele before leaving to form the Finnigan Corporation in 1967. The Corporation’s first product, a combined gas chromatograph-mass spectrometer system known as the Model 1015, was introduced in late 1967 and notably popularized the use of the quadrupole mass filter as an ion sorting device among chemists and biomedical scientists. In 1968, the Finnigan Corporation developed a simpler, lower cost version of the 1015, the Model 3000 GC Peak Identifier. The Model 3000 was the first in Finnigan's 3000 Series GC/MS and, by the end of 1975, the Corporation had delivered approximately 850 GC/MS systems worldwide. As the analytical instruments industry consolidated throughout the 1980s, Thermo Instruments ultimately acquired the Finnigan Corporation in 1990 and Robert Finnigan subsequently retired from the company in 1992.