Eighty years of polarography - History and future

Since 1922, when Professor Jaroslav Heyrovsky carried out his pioneering experiment with a dropping mercury electrode, polarography showed remarkable ability to adjust to ever increasing demands on the sensitivity and selectivity and up to now mercury electrodes are among the best sensors for electroanalytical measurements. The aim of this contribution is to show both the historical development of these techniques and their presence and possible future developments and to show that even today in certain cases polarographic and voltammetric techniques on mercury electrodes can successfully compete with modern separation and spectrometric techniques.