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Dr.
Bowman had to improvise with his design. Authorized
only to buy one expensive monochromator,
for example, he built the other one from parts
he obtained from his contacts in the New York
junk shop trade. One of his parts, a Steinheil
quartz prism spectrograph, had been "liberated"
from Germany during the war. He made his first
prototype SPF with a mixture of used and new parts,
including diffraction
gratings and mirrors attached to a
stone benchtop and "glued" in place
with wax."
Because
of exciting results with the prototype, the American
Instrument Company (AMINCO) of nearby Silver Spring,
Maryland, became interested in marketing the new
instrument. The company assigned an engineer,
Hugh Howerton, to collaborate with Dr. Bowman
on a commercial version of the SPF-one that could
be made without wax and war relics. The first
AMINCO-Bowman SPF was exhibited at the 1956 Pittsburgh
Analytical Instrument Conference.
In
order to build interest in its product and promote
research in the field of fluorescence, AMINCO
funded a postdoctoral fellowship in fluorescence
analysis for research at the National Heart Institute.
The first AMINCO fellow, Dr. Daniel Duggan, studied
hundreds of fluorescent compounds. His research
convinced Dr. Bowman and AMINCO that they should
proceed with the production of the SPF.
AMINCO
sold out its initial run of twenty-five instruments
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He
made his first prototype SPF with a mixture of
used and new parts.
![Symposium about the SPF](images/F2BowmanHowertonSm.jpg)
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AMINCO
engineer Hugh Howerton presenting a symposium
about the SPF. Dr. Bowman is seated in the front
row.
![Dr. Duggan with SPF prototype](images/F7DugganProtSm.jpg)
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Dr.
Daniel Duggan, a postdoctoral fellow at NHI, with
the first laboratory prototype of the SPF.
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