The history of modern cleanrooms has evolved out of the medical field and has become a critical piece of infrastructure today. During the mid 1800s, Louis Pasteur was an influential chemist in the medical field of microbiology. He realized through his studies that there was a relationship between microorganisms and food, diseases and people. He researched and discovered the positive and negative roles microorganisms had in everyday life and in fighting illnesses.

Pasteur was influential in the medical field in the relationships between microorganisms and living beings, but Joseph Lister took this evidence one step farther. In his role as a surgeon, he saw first hand the effects of microorganisms on humans and decided to find effective ways of creating aseptic rooms for surgery. He developed sterilizing sprays and leaned on the importance of washing hands and sterilizing his surgical instruments to limit the microorganisms present at the time of surgery. However, he didn’t account for the airborne contaminants that can affect patients.

It wasn’t until physicist, Willis Whitfield created the cleanroom as we know them today. Modular cleanrooms offer the ability to create custom cleanrooms and move them if your company moves buildings. With a journey that took over 100 years to develop a way to lower the contamination levels in a designated space. Today, modular cleanrooms are in every compliant U.S. pharmaceutical company, in addition to other industries, like semiconductors, research centers and more specialized fields. They are used to manage the amount of particulate matter and bioburden present when creating prescription medications and other consumables.