What Did the Past Smell Like?
When people entertain transporting to the past, 19th-century Berlin, say, they don’t often imagine a dramatic shift in smellscape. The inhabitants talk differently. Their fashion looks strange. But what do those streets smell like? Suddenly, it hits you—a texture of reality carried by a strong whiff of … horse manure. It may very well be that, among all your sense organs, your nose would register the starkest change.
Even so, it’s a tricky thing to pin down smellscapes of the past. Smells are notoriously fickle. They are not suited for permanent capture or easily imagined. Odors are caused by airborne compounds emanating from materials. The moment you open a perfume bottle it releases the very volatiles of which it is composed. (A museum of historical perfumes would come to a foreseeable end if it adopted an open-bottle policy.) That’s why the sensory recreation of history presents an intriguing scientific challenge1: How do we know whether we’ve succeeded?
That’s a question with which the minds behind “” will have to grapple. Launching this January, it is a $3.3 million, three-year, multinational We became aware of our need for environmental stimulation—and the undervalued power of smell.
