Abstract
IT is stated in the Beama Journal of July that electricity is now being used to measure a smell. Various electrical dovices are used in everyday work to make measurements in the domain of sight, touch and hearing and in some cases high accuracy can be obtained. We feel sure that if demand for a practical application of this device is sufficiently great it will develop into new applications just as photometry, telephony and television have developed. The first application is to measure leakage from gas mains. In this case a snout or ‘trunk’ is constructed of such a shape that it can conveniently be poked into crevices along the gas mains. The operator presses a button and if there is a leak a sample of the gas is inhaled quickly into a test chamber, where it flows over an electrically heated platinum wire and registers on the meter the percentage of gas present. We are told that the electric device can do something which the human nose cannot always do. It can tell infallibly the difference between town's gas and sewer gas.
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Olfactory Electricity. Nature 144, 437–438 (1939). https://doi.org/10.1038/144437d0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/144437d0