Baur, Albert

The artificial musk which was the first to achieve marked success was that manufactured under the patent of Albert Baur (English patent No. 4963 of 1889). The provisional and complete specifications of this patent are as follows —... 

Provisional Specification.—I, Albert Baur of Gispersleben, in the Empire of Germany, Doctor, do hereby declare the nature of this invention to be as follows —... 

W4. World Health Organization Nomenclature Committee. Nomenclature for factors of the HLA system 1984. In Histocompatibility Testing 1984 (E. D. Albert, M. P. Baur, and W. R. Mayr, eds.), pp. 4-8. Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 1984. 

In 1889, a turning point in perfume preparation had come, when Aime Guerlain introduced his perfume /icfcy , in which, for the first time, only synthetically generated vanillin, coumarin and heliotropin (3,4-methylenedioxy-benzaldehyde also known as piperonal) were used. In the course of his work on highly nitrated benzene derivatives, which would become very important as explosives, the French chemist Albert Baur found by chance a group of compounds with a musk odour. Ferdinand Tiemann in Berlin, looking for a syn-... 

In 1888, Albert Baur, while experimenting with explosives, stumbled onto some synthetic compounds that smelled like musk. Two of these compounds are shown below. (Note the similarity between the structure of musk Baur and that of TNT.) Musk ketone, the molecule that smelled closest to muscone, was far cheaper than natural musk, but it was toxic and hazardous to prepare. In the 1950s, it was replaced with a series of synthetic musk compounds without the NOi groups. These new compounds are widely used in the fragrance industry. 

In 1888, a German chemist named Albert Baur decided to introduce a butyl group into TNT to try to make it more explosive. He synthesized a variation of TNT with a tertiary butyl group replacing a hydrogen atom. Baur was disappointed when this did not have explosive properties, but things turned out well, as it had a marvelous musk smell, and was adopted by the perfume industry. In the ultimate compliment to a chemist, the compound came to be known as Musk Baur. 

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