The laboratory traces its origin to a basement facility at Purdue University, where the first equipment arrived in the summer of 1975. A team of molecular beam researchers who had lost their funding had recently abandoned the facility. The principal investigator, Nick Winograd, was focusing his research toward developing novel methods of surface analysis, a rapidly developing new field of research. The rather unspecific chemical information offered by electron spectroscopy, the method of choice in those days, inspired a search toward more interesting chemical probes of surface composition. Evidence was building that energetic heavy ions could desorb molecules from surfaces and that their mass spectra contained information about the surface chemistry. Winograd enlisted the aid of Graham Cooks, Nick Delgass, Bill Baitinger and Jon Amy to provide knowledge about mass spectrometry and instrumentation. The five of them wrote a major proposal to NSF, which eventually provided the impetus to get things going. Using an early quadrupole mass analyzer, the group reported the first detection of high mass ions, cationization of organic molecules and the power of combining electron spectroscopy and surface mass spectrometry into a single instrument.
A major breakthrough was reported during the latter part of the 1970's when Winograd, in collaboration with Barbara Garrison and Don Harrison, began an undertaking to unravel the complexities of ion/solid interactions on a fundamental level. Using molecular dynamics computer simulations, they were able to produce atomic-level pictures of the motion leading to desorption and to make a number of predictions about the behavior of velocity distributions, angle distributions, cluster formation mechanisms and