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Unrelated, but reading this reminded me of the story. One of my chemistry teachers in high school made a lab where we had to identify various substances by smel

Unrelated, but reading this reminded me of the story. One of my chemistry teachers in high school made a lab where we had to identify various substances by smell. H2S was one of those substances, and we were told it had a distinctive sulfuric smell. I remember trying to smell the substance by wafting[0] (as previous teachers had instructed us) and thinking 'hm, I thought I smelled that a second ago, but now I can't'. My teacher's response was 'oh, you're just not smelling it hard enough. You really need to take a big sniff' and stuck his nose over the petri dish to demonstrate. Fortunately I was skeptical enough of him by this point in the semester that I ignored him. Only later did I look it up and discover that H2S is not actually odorless - it smell like rotten eggs. But it also dulls your sense of smell at the same time[1]. This is only one of several times when he almost killed us with labs in that class (my favorite was when he came just a second away from lighting a classmate on fire with Thermite[2]). I'm really glad I'm not in high school anymore. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQis0nnap74 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EQis0nnap74 [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide#Safety https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_sulfide#Safety [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermite

Florin_Andrei 11y ago
Well, I made H2S on a few occasions in high school, and I always thought it has a powerful odor of rotten eggs. I have no doubt about it. You make a little H2S in a test tube, you will know, along with everyone else in the room and perhaps in adjacent rooms too. I don't doubt that it deadens the sense of smell, I'm just saying it's nowhere near odorless on first contact. Of course, I never made an amount large enough, nor did I stuck around long enough, for the sense impairment to occur.

Florin_Andrei 11y ago

Well, I made H2S on a few occasions in high school, and I always thought it has a powerful odor of rotten eggs. I have no doubt about it. You make a little H2S in a test tube, you will know, along with everyone else in the room and perhaps in adjacent rooms too. I don't doubt that it deadens the sense of smell, I'm just saying it's nowhere near odorless on first contact. Of course, I never made an amount large enough, nor did I stuck around long enough, for the sense impairment to occur.