WORLD ACHIEVEMENT

Waikato Times, Volume 125, Issue 20916, 22 September 1939, Page 10

WORLD ACHIEVEMENT

SEEING A SMELL Wonders never cease.. The wisest or the maddest men of last century could never in any circumstances have prophesied what the scientist of this century would be up to next. He has achieved some astonishing results already. Now he has gone a step farther and weighed a smell. What is more he has seen it! It sounds fantastic, blit it is true—and the master magician is M. Breitenbach, of Paris. What he has done, among oiher things, it to photograph the smell of a lily and of a piece of camphor, and the photographs have been seen and closely examined by many scientific experts. He placed a lily near a pool of still mercury—a shining mirror. It was no more than a few hundredths of an inch from the mercury, but it did not touch the little metal lake. From the lily went forth molecules of smell, covering the surface of the mercury. When talc powder was lightly dusted over the mercury, the smell particles, infinitely small, pushed aside the talc and made u film about one molecule in thickness—as thin as the black point in a soap-bubble a moment before it bursts. The effect was photographed, and the astonishing tiling is that the pho-

tograpli (it looked like a volcanic eruption in the sun j enables scientists to calculate the.weight of the smell. What next, we wonder, what next?