The growth of membrane technology

Not all journal articles come out of the same mold. This one is a hybrid. It has some of the elements of a review. But any comprehensive review of the membrane technology field written today would have to contain even more references than this one does. It is also partly an overview, giving my opinions of what, among all the work done in this field over the past two centuries or so, is most relevant: what were the seminal works that led to the present state of development of membrane technology. Further, in places this article is a bit tutorial, and for this I ask the informed reader's indelgence. Finally, it is a somewhat personalized story, as the interested reader who suffers through all of the References and Notes will discover.