Musk Tonkin

The natural musks were always very expensive and their macrocyclic structures presented synthetic challenges which were not conquered, even on laboratory scale, until the pioneering work of Ruzicka in 1926. It was therefore of major importance to the fragrance industry when, in 1888, Baur discovered the nitromusks. He had actually been working on explosives and noticed that the product of t-butylation of trinitrotoluene (TNT) had a pleasant, sweet, musky odour. The compound was named Musk Baur (38), although the alternative name, Musk Toluene , eventually became more common. For a while it was also known as Tonkinol because of the similarity of its odour to that of musk Tonkin. Baur then searched for analogues of this material and... 

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