A recent "Cosmos" episode recounted that it was Clair Patterson who used the worlds very first "ultra clean room" to count the parts per million of lead in a meteorite to determine the age of the earth. Wikipedia says this happened in 1953. This is 9 years before the ultra clean room patent in 1963.
There were multiple variations of 'ultra clean rooms' existing around that time. The one in this article is considered the most revolutionary because of the air-cycling features.
I knew of laminar-flow [1] from my old competitive sailing days, never knew the same principle was used for clean room tech. An amazing invention, RIP Mr. Whitfield.
"Clean benches" are pretty neat, basically just a laminar flow ULPA panel filter with fans on top, mounted above a work surface. They are used in applications like hard drive disaster recovery labs - you don't need an expensive cleanroom, just plop a couple of these benches in an ordinary "dirty room" as they are called. As long as you open up the drive on the bench and don't remove it from the bench until it's sealed back up, you're good to go!
We use this at a contractor site for testing. Assembly of electronics has already happened, so no need for a high grade clean room environment, but still has to be relatively dust free. We call it a "flow bench".
Does anyone know if he or his company patented it?