SMELLS IN HISTORY · EXACT DAY
30 August 1862
SmellBook holds 1 checked passage that states this time: 30 August 1862. The passage records what one source wrote, not what everything smelled like then.
SmellBook records: Describing the first journey along the whole of London's not yet finished Metropolitan Railway, made by invited guests in August 1862, James Hain Friswell wrote that Gower Street station had no smell of damp or confined air and that the air stayed dry and pleasant on that hot day.
Claim: No smell of damp on the first Underground · A journey underground (periodical), published 20 September 1862, p. 362. The passage itself states the time it describes.
About this time
A period is the time a checked historical passage describes, kept at the precision the evidence gives: a century (only when the passage states one), a year, a month or a day; when a passage states no time, its publication date is used as the latest time it can describe. A smell is linked to it only through a VERIFIED claim on a historical source. Each link records what one source wrote, which may be later than the time it describes; it does not describe a whole city or era, it says nothing about the smell today, and it is not evidence that a smell has changed or disappeared. Decades and centuries only group these records for browsing.
For researchers and developers
Graph record
This period and its links, each with where it comes from, as data.
Permanent identifier smellbook:period:1862-08-30 · Graph record (JSON)
Cite as SmellBook. (2026). 30 August 1862 (period). SmellBook knowledge graph, dataset release of 2026-10-25. smellbook:period:1862-08-30. https://smellbook.com/periods/1862-08-30
Dataset history In the SmellBook dataset since the dataset release of 2026-10-19.