What the Nose Knows
Smell detectives, laughing gas, and all the forces we cannot see
Melanie Kiechle introduces us to the 19th-century world of smell detectives, where the nose reigned supreme and cities mapped their stench patterns; Sam Kean tells how gases can have a profound effect on us—from knocking us out to making us laugh, and even causing the French Revolution. Plus, top off our exploration into the sensory world of invisible forces with an excerpt from a new book on all the light we cannot see.
Go beyond the episode:
- Melanie Kiechle’s Smell Detectives: An Olfactory History of Nineteenth-Century Urban America
- Sam Kean’s Caesar’s Last Breath: Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us
- Read an excerpt from Bob Berman’s new book about invisible light, Zapped
- Check out a modern-day smell map of the City of Light (and odor), from graphic designer Kate McLean
- Live in Pittsburgh? Download Smell PGH, the app that tracks pollution odors (read more here)
- Read more about the volcanic eruption that led to the French Revolution
- Flip through the scanned pages of Humphry Davy’s book on his laughing gas experiments, which could use a funnier title: Researches, chemical and philosophical chiefly concerning nitrous oxide, or diphlogisticated nitrous air, and its respiration
In his 1854 “Sanitary Map of the City of New Orleans,” physician Edward H. Barton noted the location of every city feature that produced foul odors. In addition to the undrained swamps, open drains, and filth-covered low ground noted on the margins of the map, the dark crosshatched blocks indicate the location of “such Nuisances as Cemetaries [sic], Slaughter houses, Vacheries, Livery stables, Markets, Sugar depots on the levee, Manufactories of soap, tallow, bone, Open basins & unfilled lots, Canals, Drains, Gas works, Fever nests, Crowded boarding houses.” The dark lines along streets indicate soil that had been disturbed for improvements such as railroads, canals, drains, ditches, water mains, and gas lines. (Report of the Sanitary Commission of New Orleans on the Epidemic Yellow Fever of 1853 (New Orleans: Picayune Office, 1854), map S. Courtesy American Antiquarian Society)
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