Coulter died and the world lost a rare visionary. He was a self-reliant inventor/ entrepreneur in the mold of the great inventors of the late 19th/early 20th century such as Thomas Edison. In fact Thomas Edison was a boyhood hero of Wallace Coulter.
Wallace Henry Coulter was born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1913. He attended Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri and later studied electrical engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Later in his life, he was honored with the awarding of numerous honorary doctorate degrees from a number of universities including Clarkson University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. Beginning in 1937, he served as a sales and service representative for the General Electric X-Ray Corporation in the Far East. During this time, he developed a passion for Oriental jade art which continued his whole life and resulted in the accumulation of a world class jade collection. Many on visits to the Coulter Corporation had the distinct pleasure of receiving a tour of the impressive collection he kept in his office, only a part of what he owned. Following his stint in the Orient, he worked on electronics development at Press Wireless and on medical instrumentation development at the Raytheon Manufacturing Company beginning in 1942. In 1946, Wallace Coulter returned to Chicago. During these years, while working for the Illinois Tool Works and the Mittelman Electronics Division of Century Steel, he ''played'' in his basement with his brother, Joe. This ''playing'' culminated in development of the Coulter Principle, and ultimately in the Coulter Counter. A patent for the Coulter Counter followed in 1953. This technology revolutionized the field of clinical hematology leading to an automated, standardized analysis of blood cells. The rest is history, and what a success story with 73 more patents to follow. The brothers Coulter founded the Coulter Corporation in 1958 moving their corporate headquarters and operations to Miami in 1961.
These principles, along with Wallace Coulter's and Coulter Corporation's dedication to research, played prominently in the development of flow cytometry. In fact, clearly, this commitment to the technology, and to the development of the associated reagents such as monoclonal antibodies, were critical in the evolution of the cytometry field. By the time I first met Wallace Coulter in the early 80's, flow cytometry technology was well developed, although still a few years from being a routine diagnostic instrument. I was a young, biophysics graduate student in Hialeah for instrument training. I met Wallace Coulter as he strolled through the cafeteria, informally dressed, with his signature ''fishing'' hat on. Obviously, the ease of all with which he chatted reflected, and I later found out that he often did this. It was a reflection of his