re: #115 FemNaziBitch

SKUNK!

There’s a very entertaining chemistry blog I found recently that considers “things I won’t work on”. The main categories are things that are ridiculously explosive, things that are ridiculously toxic and things that are ridiculously malodorous.

A small writing sample:

But today’s compound makes no noise and leaves no wreckage. It merely stinks. But it does so relentlessly and unbearably. It makes innocent downwind pedestrians stagger, clutch their stomachs, and flee in terror. It reeks to a degree that makes people suspect evil supernatural forces. It is thioacetone.

Or something close to it, anyway. All we know for sure is that thioacetone doesn’t like to exist as a free compound - it’s usually tied up in a cyclic thioketal trimer, when it’s around at all. Attempts to crack this to thioacetone monomer itself have been made - ah, but that’s when people start diving out of windows and vomiting into wastebaskets, so the quality of the data starts to deteriorate. No one’s quite sure what the actual odorant is (perhaps the gem-dimercaptan?) And no one seems to have much desire to find out, either.

There are sound historical reasons for this reluctance. The canonical example (Chemische Berichte 1889, 2593) is the early work in the German city of Freiburg in 1889 (see page 4 of this textbook), which quotes the first-hand report. This reaction produced”an offensive smell which spread rapidly over a great area of the town causing fainting, vomiting and a panic evacuation.”. An 1890 report from the Whitehall Soap Works in Leeds refers to the odor as “fearful”, and if you could smell anything through the ambient conditions in a Leeds soap factory in 1890, it must have been.

pipeline.corante.com