From the pungent scent of a cigar to the gentle fragrance of roses, smells can transport us to days gone by. Now researchers are hoping to harness the pongs of the past to do just that.
Scientists, historians and experts in artificial intelligence across the UK and Europe have announced they are teaming up for a €2.8m project labelled “Odeuropa” to identify and even recreate the aromas that would have assailed noses between the 16th and early 20th centuries.
Just go bottle the air in Paris.
Has the requisite amount of dog shit lying around, cheap tobacco and, of course, the use of too much perfume to cover up soap dodging. Done then, eh?
So it’s all horseshit, then?
Barcelona drains on a hot August afternoon… Covers just about everything. 🙂
. . . recreate the aromas that would have assailed noses between the 16th and early 20th centuries.
On present course it won’t be long before Europe is recreating poverty, pestilence and mass murders. The ancient scents will arise naturally enough.
They did that at the Yorvik museum years ago. How accurate it was we’ll never know and I find it hard to think of how AI will make it more accurate.
As with medieval music performed on period instruments; you may be able to recreate the authentic sound but you can only hear it with modern ears.
Not just Barcelona, in practically every large European town (even in Germany) you can smell “eau de sewer” if you stand in the right (wrong) place – yet it’s very rare in the UK. I’m not sure why – it’s not as though building working drains is some mysterious form of rocket science.
Ah, that’s one of the things I can tell you about. The environmentalists have managed to convince (especially in Germany) everyone that water is a scarce resource that must be conserved. So, toilets, showers, etc etc, aren’t pumping enough water down through the sewers. Or not as much as they were designed for at least. So, the self-cleaning aspect of grey water isn’t happening.
Another thing could be how they build sewerage systems. I was watching a couple of Dagos buiding an inspection chamber, last year. Any UK building inspector would have presumed they were a comedy act. It had so many breaches of UK regulations, about the only thing that complied was the hole. And that hadn’t been dug deep enough for the base concrete.
During the Great Drought, I noticed that, among all the water saving notions being pushed by the media, using grey water to keep your lawn green was conspicuously absent. No doubt they were concerned about what you mentioned, Tim.
Of course I did buy a hose to dump water from my washing machine on the back lawn. But the sheer bother of doing so meant that the Greenies won after all.
Thanks Tim, that might account for Germany, but there were plenty of great stinks in southern Europe, long before the ecoloons were thought of.