Mimeographs.
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I’m still waiting for someone to bring back the distinctive smell of old electronics, like the ol’ Colecovision. Last time it came up, someone suggested it was phenolic resin from the brown FR-1 or FR-2 substrates used in circuit boards of the era. I remember a distinctive scent of old Ikea furniture too.
Will someone one day pine for the smell of Dell laptops?
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Wiki indicates Bestine was heptane based, which is both still available and not a carcinogen (per http://www.ilo.org/dyn/icsc/showcard.display?p_lang=en&p_card_id=0657 ), so there’s still hope!
Beautiful flowers losing their scent:
It seems that the breeding behind the huge variety of roses and other ornamental flowers now available has also inadvertently diminished the flowers’ scents. In an excellent Science News article, Ivan Amato examines why today’s ornamentals don’t smell as good as they once did. He also discusses how flower scientists are looking at ways to resurrect lost scents and even engineer new ones. From the article:
“Pigment compounds are derived from the same biochemical precursors [as scent compounds are], so it makes sense that if you make more of one you get less of the other,” notes floral-scent biochemist and geneticist Eran Pichersky of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
Floral scent may be dwindling because breeders for the $30 billion ornamental-flower industry pay scant attention to this most emblematic attribute of flowers. “In order of [commercial] priority, color is number 1 through 10,” says Alan Blowers, head of flower biotechnology for Ball Helix, a biotech company in West Chicago, Ill., devoted to the ornamental-plant industry. Beyond color, breeders have been targeting improvements in flower longevity, shape, size, disease resistance, and other traits likely to improve the growers’ bottom lines.
Fragrance is different. It’s invisible, and its sensory impression is as subjective as taste.
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My grandmother had a bush of the old style cabbage roses, a tangled mass of sweet scented pink roses and vines; it was destroyed when a road widening crew took it out with a grader. We preserved a couple of cuttings, but don’t know how viable they will be for future generations. I did find a modern tea rose with the same scent, but much reduced: Sweet Surrender. One of the old roses could perfume a whole room; not so much with the modern ones.
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That may be what they were, but I don’t think we called them that.
Yep. And sometimes if you were helping the teacher make copies, you got to sniff ALLLLL the pages.
This is an extremely interesting concept.
I wish I could preserve the smells of specific areas, so I could revisit areas of Japan simply by smell.
I’d preserve so many smells. The Sequoia National Park in CA last year had an amazing smell. Lineshaft leather belts, PA forests, Shaving cream from Jermyn Street in London, and really old books…so many good smells.
These ones?
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Nope; not gestetner either. I wonder if it was local nickname. My thinking is that it was likely a “ditto machine”; a spirit duplicator, which used alcohol in the process because they were know to produce a fresh smell, which was probably from the alcohol evaporating off the paper.
My sister and I tried to catch farts in jars as kids.
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