In 1958, James (Jim) Logan Waters founded Waters Associates in an office in the basement of a police station in
Framingham, Massachusetts. Early products included a
boiler feedwater flame
photometer, a balloon
hydrometer, a
nerve gas detector, a lab
refractometer and process control refractometers. Dow Chemical then invested $400,000 in Waters. In 1972, Helmut Hamberger, chief post-doc for Nobel laureate
Robert Burns Woodward of Harvard University, sought Jim Waters’ help to the first synthesis of vitamin B12. Dr. Hamberger wanted to purify the positional isomers, which were needed to give him the right compound for the final stages of the synthesis. Working with Dr. Hamberger, the pair took two days to develop a separation, five more days to obtain larger columns to scale up the separation, and three more days to prep his material, successfully isolating and purifying 200 mg of the precursor compound. In 1996, in addition to acquiring TA Instruments, In January 2020, it acquired Andrew Alliance, a producer of software and robotics for laboratory automation, for $77.4 million. In September, Udit Batra was named President and Chief Executive Officer of the company. In May 2023, Waters acquired
Wyatt Technology for $1.36 billion in cash. In July 2025, Waters agreed to merge with the biosciences & diagnostics unit of
Becton Dickinson, subject to shareholder approval. As the merger approached completion, Waters faced $17.5B shareholder suits which accuse Waters of leaving out key details from the proxy statement about the deal. On February 9, 2026, Waters Corporation announced that it had completed the merger with the former division of Becton Dickinson. ==Mass spectrometers==