Shiny Things - April 22nd, 2008

10:57 am - How Smell Works

I thought today's Straight Dope mail bag article was particularly interesting. I remember when I was pretty young a friend mentioned that he hated going into livestock barns, because he knew if he could smell the manure, manure molecules must be in the air and getting all over him. He was right.

I've wondered for some time if we would ever be able to mechanically reproduce smells the way we do with light and sound: perhaps something that releases samples from the seven primary odorant groupings (camphoric, musky, rose, peppermint, etherial, pungent, and putrid) could do a worthwhile but limited simulation, sort of like black & white TV does for vision. You'd have to periodically replenish the chemicals, I assume.

It was also interesting to me to learn that you can't actually smell metal, but smell instead the oxidated lipids upon them. Come to think of it, maybe that's why all metals seem to smell the same.