User:UmichSSGleader/Reaction History

History

The Ritter reaction is named after John J. Ritter, an American chemist who received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. In May of 1948, P. Paul Minieri, Ritter's student, submitted a thesis to the Graduate School of New York University in order to fulfill the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Ritter and Minieri collaborated together to perform the experiment in the Microchemistry Laboratory at NYU. According to the original article published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society in 1948, Ritter and Minieri described the new, versatile reaction of a nitrile being transformed, in the presence of sulfuric acid and alkenes, into an amide. They characterized the product to confirm that it was a N-alkyl amide through the Kjeldahl method, which quantitatively determines nitrogen presence in chemical substances. Although it was developed 62 years ago, the reaction still has significance today due to its applicability and reproducibility of amides via stabilized carbocations.