Rights: The text is in the public domain (basis recorded). The provider's own terms of use apply to the digitised copy. An unsigned note published in the United States in December 1898: in the public domain in the United States, and anonymous works are protected for no more than 70 years from publication where copyright lasts 70 years.
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CITATION CHECK
Title, creator, publisher and date checked against the catalogue record on 2026-10-05 by an automated check. The Wikisource Index record covers Volume 54 (November 1898 to April 1899, catalogued as 1899); the article page places the unsigned note in the December 1898 issue's Fragments of Science, on image 297, and the Internet Archive item agrees on the periodical and volume. Date confirmed to the month. SmellBook publishes only the citation, the location of the passage and its own claim, never the work’s text.
An unsigned 1898 note in Popular Science Monthly reports W. E. Ayrton's observation that most commercial metals lost their smell when cleaned but acquired characteristic smells when handled or rubbed, and that breathing on cleaned metals also produced a smell; Ayrton looked for the source of these smells in hydrogen given off and carrying impurities such as hydrocarbons, and thought it probable that no metal particles reach the nose.
A contemporary summary of a scientific address, kept as historical evidence of how the question was understood in 1898; it is not current scientific evidence.EXTERNAL RECORD