The history of chromatography spans from the mid-19th century to the 21st.  Chromatography, literally "color writing", was used—and named— in the first decade of the 20th century, primarily for the separation of plant pigments such as chlorophyll (which is green) and carotenoids (which are orange and yellow).  New forms of chromatography developed in the 1930s and 1940s made the technique useful for a wide range of separation processes and chemical analysis tasks, especially in biochemistry.