{"id":241,"date":"2016-09-25T13:49:00","date_gmt":"2016-09-25T20:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/panjora.com\/wordpress\/?p=241"},"modified":"2016-09-25T13:50:21","modified_gmt":"2016-09-25T20:50:21","slug":"meet-the-woman-who-is-preserving-the-smell-of-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/panjora.com\/wordpress\/?p=241","title":{"rendered":"Meet the Woman Who Is Preserving the Smell of History"},"content":{"rendered":"
http:\/\/www.atlasobscura.com\/articles\/meet-the-woman-who-is-preserving-the-smell-of-history<\/pre>\n
One scientist’s quest to capture old scents.<\/h1>\n
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By Eric Grundhauser<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n
SEPTEMBER 20, 2016<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Cecilia Bembibre sampling the VOCs of an old book. (Photo:\u00a0HMahgoub\/Used with Permission)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
We experience our world with five senses to guide us, but for the most part, we learn about\u00a0the past with only three.\u00a0We have become adept\u00a0at preserving our history\u00a0in audio, visual, and tactile forms, while\u00a0old recipes can communicate taste, but rarely do we ever think to capture a whiff of the scents that swirl around us.<\/p>\n
Luckily, there are scientists who think that stinks, and are doing something about it.\u00a0Cecilia Bembibre,<\/a>\u00a0a\u00a0doctoral\u00a0candidate\u00a0at University College London, is attempting to preserve history like very few before her. She\u2019s cataloging the smells.<\/p>\n
Smells “help us connect to history in a more human way,” says Bembibre, whoseproject<\/a>\u00a0combines chemistry, electronic noses, and centuries-old English manor houses.<\/p>\n
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Bembibre records the smells of historic locations and objects around England, looking for sites that are both culturally significant and strongly scented. Currently, her research is focused on two locations:\u00a0Knole House<\/a>, an English estate that has been inhabited by the same family since it was built in the 15th century; and\u00a0the library in St. Paul\u2019s Cathedral<\/a>, a perfectly stuffy room full of books and pieces of furniture that are hundreds of years old.<\/p>\n
The room at St. Paul’s is opened by appointment only, helping to maintain its heady scent. \u201cIt\u2019s a wonderful library and it smells great,\u201d says Bembibre.<\/p>\n
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Scent-collecting fibers set up to capture VOCs at St Paul\u2019s Cathedral Library. (Photo: Courtesy ofCecilia<\/a>\u00a0Bembibre<\/a>)<\/span><\/p>\n
A veritable treasure trove of historic smells,\u00a0Knole House<\/a>\u00a0is said to contain 365 rooms. The sprawling mansion has the added benefit of an extensive family archive, which offers\u00a0the researchers valuable historical context for the objects they are sniffing.<\/p>\n
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Bembibre\u00a0has selected\u00a0a handful of objects and atmospheres to test there, including a pair of fringed, leather gloves from the 1800s (“I think the gloves might have been perfumed”); a unique 1750s potpourri recipe found in the archives; the wax used to polish the furniture; the smell of the \u201cVenetian Ambassador\u201d room; an old book; and more modern smells, like\u00a0a vinyl record from the family\u2019s collection.<\/p>\n
But how do you even go about recording\u00a0a smell?<\/p>\n
Bembibre uses several\u00a0different methods to capture a smell for study. One is known as the Headspace technique, wherein an object is placed inside a clean, sealed bag that has a valve on it, sealing in the volatile organic compounds, or VOCs. Then an absorbent carbon fiber is inserted into the valve to soak up the ambient VOCs that have been isolated inside. She also uses another method, known as passive diffusion, which involves leaving a sort of carbon sponge in a space and allowing it to just soak up the nearby smells.<\/p>\n
Once the VOC-laden sample is ready, Bembibre runs it through a gas chromatographer and mass spectrometer, which she describes as a \u201cbig nose.\u201d In the end, she is left with a sort of electrocardiogram, but for smells, which she can use to identify the various chemicals in a smell. \u201cIt would be like having a recipe, and maybe in 100 years, someone wanted to reproduce that smell, they could look at that recipe,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n
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Knole House. But what does it smell like? (Photo:\u00a0Martin Stitchener\/CC BY 2.0<\/a>)\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n
The analyses can be surprising. For example, the\u00a0smell of an old book is primarily made up of\u00a0chemicals like\u00a0acetic acid, which smells like vinegar; furfural (\u201cIt smells sweet, like bread and almonds. It\u2019s a very pleasant book smell\u201d); benzaldehyde (\u201cIt has a very sweet, almond-y, cinnamon-y smell even. It smells of food\u201d); vanillin, which smells of vanilla; and hexanol, which has been likened to freshly cut grass.<\/p>\n
Taken all together, these chemicals, many of which are a product of cellular decay, create what we think of as the old book smell. \u201cIt\u2019s a smell that we appreciate, but it\u2019s also the smell of the books dying,\u201d says Bembibre.<\/p>\n
One of her research partners, the company Odournet<\/a>, works with an adapted chromatographer that allows Bembibre, and other researchers, to actually smell each component as it is processed. She says that it\u2019s a heady experience, with scents coming at you so fast that it\u2019s hard to accurately identify them\u2014no easy feat to begin with.<\/p>\n
Because our olfactory senses are so closely tied to context, identifying scents\u00a0just by their chemical make-up doesn\u2019t do us a whole lot of good, when it comes to the historical record. \u201cSmells are anchored in a time and a place, so it\u2019s not enough to have the chemical information for a smell,\u201d says Bembibre.\u00a0\u201cWe also need to know if people thought that smell was pleasant or unpleasant, strong or weak; if it had some sort of cultural associations; if it was unique or familiar; if people thought it was worth keeping or not, and why.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Cecilia Bembibre sniffs the smells of\u00a0St Paul\u2019s Cathedral Library. (Photo: Courtesy of Cecilia Bembibre<\/a>)<\/span><\/p>\n
Opinion plays a significant part in the analysis, too. Bembibre is far from scent-agnostic, though; she has smells she loves and odors she hates, just like the rest of us.<\/p>\n
‘There is a smell I really dislike, which is the smell of butyric acid. You find it in human sweat in a low concentration. You also find it in Hershey\u2019s chocolate, the Kisses,” she says. “I\u2019m always going to the States and thinking, \u2018How can they be so popular? How can people like them so much?\u2019 If you grew up celebrating with this chocolate, you obviously love it.”<\/p>\n
Beyond\u00a0the\u00a0academic importance of smell, she’s interested in sussing out “the personal associations, because they\u2019re part of why we think smell is worth keeping,” she\u00a0says.<\/p>\n
In addition to her studies, Bembibre currently leads “smellwalks” that bring people closer to the unique\u00a0scents\u00a0of their world. Smells\u00a0are the most visceral aspects of the human experience, and yet we lose them everyday. As the technology gets better, though, hopefully we can begin to preserve our own precious scents.<\/p>\n
Bembibre has her own\u00a0special scent memory she wishes she could preserve. \u201cI have a small child, and we\u2019ve just been on holiday to the beach. You know the smell of skin when you come back from a day at the beach and it\u2019s a bit salty, and there\u2019s the sun and the cream?” she asks.<\/p>\n
“It was just a lazy family holiday that brought me back to my own childhood. I\u2019d love to collect that smell.\u201d<\/p>\n
Correction 09\/21\/16: Previous references to spectrometers have been changed to clarify that the instruments are actually chromatographers.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
http:\/\/www.atlasobscura.com\/articles\/meet-the-woman-who-is-preserving-the-smell-of-history One scientist’s quest to capture old scents. By Eric Grundhauser SEPTEMBER 20, 2016 Cecilia Bembibre sampling the VOCs of an old book. (Photo:\u00a0HMahgoub\/Used with Permission)\u00a0 We experience our world with five senses to guide us, but for the most … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[38,23,27,22,39,17],"class_list":["post-241","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fragrance","tag-history","tag-memory","tag-olfactory","tag-scent","tag-science","tag-smell"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/panjora.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/panjora.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/panjora.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panjora.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panjora.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=241"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/panjora.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":243,"href":"https:\/\/panjora.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/241\/revisions\/243"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/panjora.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panjora.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/panjora.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}