SMELLS IN HISTORY · IN SOURCES PUBLISHED DECEMBER 1898
December 1898
SmellBook holds 1 checked passage from a source published in December 1898. The passage states no time of its own, so December 1898 is only the latest time it can describe; it may describe an earlier time. The passage records what one source wrote, not what everything smelled like.
SmellBook records: 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.
Claim: Why handled metals smell, as reported in 1898 · The Physics of Smell (periodical), p. 283. The passage states no time; the source's publication date is used as the latest possible 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:1898-12 · Graph record (JSON)
Cite as SmellBook. (2026). December 1898 (period). SmellBook knowledge graph, dataset release of 2026-10-25. smellbook:period:1898-12. https://smellbook.com/periods/1898-12
Dataset history In the SmellBook dataset since the dataset release of 2026-10-19.