Survey of Progress in Chemistry

Research in my laboratories on the chemistry of ruthenium ammines was initiated by Endicott1 about a dozen years ago. By then the earlier researches of Gleu and co-workers,2 which led to the preparation and characterization of a number of ammine complexes of Ru(II) and Ru(III), had all but been forgotten. The reawakening of interest in these species was by no means limited to my own research group. In fact, the early results of Lever and Powell (1959; reported more fully in Lever and Powell, 1969), though described only briefly, were an encouragement to us in our first, often frustrating, attempts to gain control over the preparative and other manipulations of the ruthenium ammines. Even before Lever's results were published, Hartmann and Buschbeck (1957) had prepared some of the ammine complexes and had determined and advanced interpretations of their absorption spectra.