Why do corrugated cardboard boxes smell of puke?

Don't bring that up again!

You had a fume cupboard with inward airflow?? Someone f***ed up badly there, then!

American Chocolate flavouring?

We had an extraordinarily arrogant chemistry teacher who was nonchalantly leaning on a pillar with a lit Bunsen burner under his elbow. Boys put their hands up to tell him but he waved them off with the other arm.

We just sat there until his lab coat burst into flames.

How do we know it is water? Said ours one day.

Suck it and see Sir, said Carcass Stevens from the back row.

Have you ever smelled Copydex?

I must have but I cannot recall it being especially vile.

There is that ammonia/latex stuff used to glue cloth and leather though...

oh...that IS copydex isn't it? I liked the smell.

I imagine all fume cupboards suck air in from the room through the working opening. A bit pointless otherwise.

Tim

Cats' Urine - IIRC !

For a few months in 1969 I worked in the technology library of the Leicester College of Art & Technology (it became Leicester Polytechnic while I was there and De Montfort University subsequently). The chemistry labs were nearby; the smells that emerged from them were appalling.

I mean that air from the lab was drawn into the fume cupboard by an extractor fan in the "ceiling" of the cupboard to keep it at a slight negative pressure so fumes *in theory* didn't escape into the lab. Isn't that how all fume cupboards work?

It was a great year that I spent in the lab. My lab supervisor was an ageing hippy with leathery, lined skin like Keith Richards. Under his anonymous lab coat he often wore a Stones or Def Leppard teeshirt. I remember trying to reproduce a reaction described in a paper by a guy with the memorable name of Hnatowich, and some of the details of quantities were a bit vague, so Tony said "Oh, just add smidgen." And then he burst into song "It just takes a smidgen / To poison a pigeon" - and so he introduced me to the satirical songs of Tom Lehrer.

One of the other gap-year students was a crazy guy who was always boasting that he was the nephew of Lord <Someone> and he used to go up to "The House" [of Lords] to meet his uncle. He had been to Marlborough, which he pronounced Mawlborough, and was the epitome of the expensively-educated twit. One weekend he was driving back from Mawlborough after a school reunion and came over a bit drowsy so he stopped his car on the hard shoulder and "found" an open Winchester of ether in the boot. Yeah, right! How he didn't pass out or blow the car up (ether is highly flammable) is a miracle. He would often pick up one of the squeezy bottles of ethanol (for use as a general solvent, so probably not very pure and maybe with a bit of methanol [*] in it as well) and squirt it into his mouth. Because we occasionally worked with cyanide compounds in the lab, there was an antidote kit which consisted of amyl nitrite. Our friend The Twit had heard that amyl nitrite gave people a fantastic high, so he took a few ampoules home and tried them. He described, in more detail than the rest of us cared to know, the fantastic stiffy and orgasm that it caused him to have. I wonder if the guy is still alive...

It has a very recognisable smell, but I wouldn't say that it smelled anything like vomit.

In the chem lab, there are various reasons for doing labs as a demonstration of something. Some labs, do result in an output compound which smells nice <inserts table showing how nice smells are possible, as a P.R. move for chemists>.

When I got the chemists magazine, one of the first things that caught my eye, is how weird all the chemists look. They would look like the Hunchback of Notre Dame. None of the people looked suitable for the inevitable "pictures-with-dyed-liquids" article :-) Did I look like that ? Yes! You should see the lump on my back, and how much I drag one foot when I move around the lab...

If I know you are in the vicinity, then I will move to the fume cabinet and make tear gas. Just for laughs mind you.

Of all the undergraduate chemists, only two of them, went on to do more advanced work in chemistry. Both did analytical work, and both did Nuclear Activation Analysis. The rest of us changed disciplines and did other things. Two of the smart ones became medical doctors. One went on to train other doctors. The other one shouldn't have been a doctor, but they let him be a doctor anyway. Not a bad sort, but I doubt he would be very satisfied with how mind-numbing the work of being an MD is. He has an IQ of 140+ and is mostly non-verbal, perfect to be a doctor. You'll never find out what you've got, if he sees you, but... he will know.

You should read the story of the guy who worked at the Glidden paint company. That at least, puts a chemist in a good light. I read a longer account somewhere, and this is a summary.

Fume cupboards are not very sophisticated.

They're not intended for you to spill things :-)

If they were for spilling things, there would have been a better scheme for gathering the spilled fluids so they could be cleaned up.

Paul

Alternatively they can make some evil smells. Methyl mercaptan (and all mercaptans) is VILE. It's the stuff that is added, a few parts-per-million, to natural gas as a "stenching agent" so gas leaks can be detected. It smells of dogshit in higher concentrations. My A level chemistry teacher had us in hysterics when she described how she accidentally spilled a bit of the liquid on one of her fingers when she was at university and the fume cupboard couldn't cope. She said the sight of people puking all around her was not one she ever wanted to see again. She was almost frogmarched to the yard outside and a hosepipe was sprayed on her to try to wash the smelly liquid off her.

Chemistry teachers at school try to ham it up a bit to create memorable scare stories. The one who took us for O level had worked "in industry" before become a teacher. When he was showing us how to use gas cylinders safely, he told us of a colleague who learned the hard way... He had been using a fairly innocuous gas (maybe CO2 or N2 - something non-flammable) and it is thought that he tried to unscrew the pressure-reducing valve and pressure gauge unit from the cylinder. The cylinder went through an upper floor and buried itself several feet in the concrete ground floor. The valve unit pierced through several floors above and disappeared through the roof. There wasn't much left of the chemist. The valve unit was found some weeks later by a security guard patrolling a fence at Heathrow Airport - four miles away. Moral "don't mess with these cylinders".

Interesting about some esters such as benzyl salicylate being ones that only some people can smell.

The substance that is excreted in the urine when you eat asparagus is one such chemical. I'm never sure whether only some people secrete it or only some people can smell it, because you don't go round smelling each other's wee so you can't work out whether the people who secrete it are the same ones who can smell it. But I do both. "Asparagus wee" is a well-known condition.

There's something (I forget what) which can only be smelled by one sex - men can smell it and women can't, or vice versa.