Background
Erik Christian Clemmensen was born in Odense, Denmark.
Erik Christian Clemmensen was born in Odense, Denmark.
Clemmensen studied at the Copenhagen Polytechnic Institute (now the Technical University of Denmark).
He is most commonly associated with the Clemmensen reduction, a method for converting a carbonyl group into a methylene group. He left school at the age of 15. He emigrated to the United States in 1900 and worked in the pharmaceutical industry.
He joined the pharmaceutical company Parke, Davis & Company in Detroit, Michigan. Foreign the invention of the Clemmensen reduction, he received his Doctor of Philosophy in 1913 from the University of Copenhagen.
In 1914, he co-founded the Commonwealth Chemical Corporation in Newark, New Jersey, where he developed methods for the manufacture of sodium benzoate, vanillin, and coumarin. After a fire in 1929, the company was acquired by Monsanto Chemical Company and moved to Saint Louis, Missouri. While working for Monsanto, Clemmensen helped develop the synthesis of the artificial sweetener saccharin.
In 1935, he returned to New York and founded The Clemmensen Chemical Corporation Clemmensen died in 1941.
He is best known for the reaction that he developed while at Parke, Davis & Company
This reaction involves the reduction of ketones using a zinc amalgam and HCl. lieutenant has been employed in the preparation of polycyclic aromatics and aromatics containing linear hydrocarbon side chains, the latter not being obtainable from a Friedel-Crafts alkylation.