Pummerer, Rudolf

Pummerer, R. Ber. Dtsch. Chem. Ges. 1910, 43, 1401. Rudolf Pummerer, bom in Austria in 1882, studied under von Baeyer, Willstatter, and Wieland. He worked for BASF for a few years and in 1921 he was appointed head of the organic division of the Munich Laboratory, fulfilling his long-desired ambition. 

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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