Shimadzu Corp.

Shimadzu Corporation (株式会社 島津製作所, Kabushiki-gaisha Shimadzu Seisakusho) is a Japanese public KK company, manufacturing precision instruments, measuring instruments and medical equipment, based in Kyoto, Japan. It was established in 1875. The American arm of the company, Shimadzu Scientific Instruments, was founded in 1975.

History

Founding and early years

The company was established by Genzo Shimadzu (島津 源蔵, Shimazu Genzō) in 1875.X-ray devices, the spectrum camera, the electron microscope, and the gas chromatograph were developed and commercialized in advance of other Japanese companies. The American arm of the company, Shimadzu Scientific Instruments, was founded in 1975.

Recent developments

In 2002, Koichi Tanaka, a longstanding employee, won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing a method of mass spectrometric analysis of biological macromolecules.

The company also developed, in 2005, an ultra-high speed video camera, HyperVision HPV-1, which is capable of recording at 1,000,000 FPS, while in 2014 it released the HyperVision HPV-X, a camera that achieves ultra-high-speed continuous recording at 10 million frames per second. Other products developed by Shimadzu include head-mounted displays.