Today’s 100-years-ago-find was pretty immediate once I saw this wonderful sketch in the newspaper under the heading “Latest facts from Science, Mechanics, and Invention.”
It’s titled, “‘Jazzin Up’ Jaded Appetites with Science’s New Taste Organ.” That’s right, taste organ. And they didn’t mean your tongue.
The picture alone is what stood out. It’s a giant organ like you’d see in a music hall, with two rows of keys, and an organist sitting at the bench. But instead of pipes extending from the top, it’s canisters of liquid, in different flavors. They’re labeled orange, lemon, wintergreen, apple, pineapple, vanilla, nectar, raspberry, cherry, lime, ambrosia, and blackberry. And the best part? There are three tubes connected to the organ. One is in the organists mouth, and the other two are in two “listeners” mouths. As the article explains, “so that the various concentrated liquids can be injected either singly or in the correct combination.”
Yum. Unless of course you remember that eventually all of those flavors would be in your mouth at the same time, right? As I understand it, your brain doesn’t simply forget flavors. If you’ve ever had a glass of orange juice even 5 minutes after brushing your teeth, you know what I mean.
The idea was developed by a French scholar and further investigated by C.F. Schurch who built a real working model that was “quite successful.” Unfortunately there is no photo of the actual build, at least that I could find, and the one in the paper is just an artist’s rendering.
The piece originally ran in that summer’s edition of Science and Invention Magazine, and playfully mentions that:
Consideration of this subject is quite as interesting indeed as that of the "smell- organ”, described several years ago in the pages of this magazine.
Well naturally I had to track that down.
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Sure enough, June 1922, there it was. The smell organ. “The Newest Noiseless Organ. It Delights You Not With Wonderful Rhapsodies in Sound, But With Wonderful Musical Combinations Expressed by Delicately Graduated Odors.”
If you’re just listening to this it’s what I described earlier but now instead of canisters atop the organ, it’s perfume spray bottles. The idea stemmed from the work of French chemist Dr. Septimus Piesse, who claimed that “every perfume produces its own particular effect on the end organs of smell terminating in the mucosa.” He even mapped out each note and its corresponding smell.
Here’s just a taste, or whiff, if you will. Mint, patchouli, lavender, cinnamon, violet, sandalwood, rose, and musk.
If you’re thinking what I am, that all those smells together would smell like walking past Bath & Body Works in the mall, Dr. Piesse was ahead of you. He says:
Of course, the combination of these odors will create a smell entirely different from any of the individual qualities of the various perfumes and it is necessary that in the soft dreamy compositions, the odors blend harmoniously.
…the audience will be saved the rather unusual embarrassment, of smelling disagreeable combinations. Some music, would perhaps have to be changed and the odors carefully graduated so that in the smells wafted over the audience no particular perfume will predominate, except when the loud pedal, or rather.in these smell organs, the strong odor pedal is trod upon.
The strong odor pedal? I’d say maybe light a match next time.
There is an elaborate explanation, then, of how the performance hall would be arranged so that the smells could waft playfully and delicately over the patrons in an organized manner. But if you’ve smelled the back ends of any regional airliner or crowded graduation in a high school gymnasium, I think it was just naive optimism on his part.
Both of these wild ideas stemmed from the “color organ,” which was described on earlier pages. That, of course is the one thing does live on today as a good idea: pairing lights with music.
But tastes and odors? I think those are better left to meal time.
See you tomorrow - Chris
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Sources
* Science and Invention July 1926
* Science and Invention June 1922
* Herald and Review; The Decatur Herald September 14, 1926
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