Benzaldehyde dibenzyl thioacetal

That the desulfurizing action of Raney nickel is retained even in the absence of hydrogen has been demonstrated by Hauptmann, Wladislaw and Camargo16 who found that Raney nickel which had been deprived of its hydrogen through heating in vacuum at 200° converted, for example, benzaldehyde dibenzyl thioacetal into a mixture of stilbene and bibenzyl. That this type of reaction proceeds by a free-radical mechanism appears... 

The Pummerer rearrangement was reported by Rudolf Pummerer in 1909 when he published a paper in Chemische Berichte. Earlier in the same year, Smythe had reported the reaction of dibenzyl sulfoxide 3 with acetic anhydride and hydrochloric acid to give benzaldehyde 4 and thioacetal 5, among other products. Smythe was apparently unable to explain the product distribution, which was then left to Pummerer do so in his much-cited paper later that year. Pummerer published the reaction of sulfinyl acetic acid 6 with hydrochloric acid to give glyoxylic acid 7. The formal oxidation of the... 

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