‘Sweat with an odour of freshly plucked feathers could suggest a case of rubella’
‘Did you ever try to measure a smell?” Alexander Graham Bell once asked an audience of graduands at a high school in Washington DC. He then quizzed the probably confused class of 1914 as to whether they could tell when one scent was twice the strength of another, or measure the difference between two distinct odours. Eventually, though, he came to the point: “Until you can measure their likenesses and difference, you can have no science of odour,” Bell said. “If you are ambitious to find a new science, measure a smell.”
At the time, scientists could describe sound and sight in terms of vibrations in the air and wavelengths of light, but there was no comparable way of explaining odours. The mechanics of smell were a mystery, and in many ways they still are.
