Arduengo, Anthony

Submitted by Brian L. Benac,la Edward M. Burgess,2 and Anthony J. Arduengo, III. 

The first paper on the synthesis of a thermally stable carbene, which could be kept in a bottle, appeared in 1991. It was entitled A Stable Crystalline Carbene and the main author was Anthony Arduengo (Fig. 8.1) from the Experimental Station of DuPont at Wilmington in the US [14]. He had set out to find a simple preparative route to industrially important imidazole-2-thiones and for this purpose treated imidazolium salts with strong bases and then added sulfur to form the required C=S bond [15, 16]. The ease with which these reactions succeeded, even in dry air, led Arduengo to believe that the respective carbenes, formed by deprotonation of the imidazolium ions, were less unstable than expected. Since the dimerization, as observed in the case of 6, was thought to... 

I especially thank Dr. Joseph Thrasher, former Head of the Chemistry Department, and Dr. Anthony J. Arduengo ni., Saxon Professor of Chemistry, who worked together to appoint me to teach Spectroscopic Methods in Organic Chemistry , the course that gave birth to this book. 

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