PAM DALTON has a bottle of Who, Me? in her lab. Dalton works at the Monell Chemical Senses Center, an independent nonprofit with ties to the nearby University of Pennsylvania and a long history of Defense Department–funded malodor research and a four-foot-tall bronze nose out in front. I first met her in 1997, when she was serving as an expert witness in a pig farm lawsuit. She was the saucy redhead happily walking the fence lines, sampling fumes with a handheld electronic nose. She has a few more laugh lines now, but her hair is still red and she still loves her work.
The Dalton Lab has no detectable smell, though there are many things in here that stink. On a shelf over our heads is a box of firefighter underarm odor, each subject’s contribution sealed in a Ziploc bag. Where other refrigerators would hold ketchup and salad dressing, Dalton’s has a bottle of civetone, a synthetic version of the anal scent gland secretions of the civet cat. The weapons-grade smells are over beneath the fume hood. The Who, Me?, which tends to cause panic if it gets into the building’s ventilation system, has been bottled, taped, double-bagged, and entombed in a small, reclosable can.
Dalton Lab manager Christopher Mauté unwraps it for me. Mauté has high cheekbones, an aquiline nose, and glossy dark hair that sweeps back from his romantic-lead hairline seemingly without the help of product. Underneath he is all science. He is, by his own description, the guy who smells the roses at the wedding reception and says, “Mmm, phenylethyl alcohol.” Mauté holds the opened bottle near my face, although doesn’t relinquish his grip on it. If I drop the Who, Me? all of Monell West becomes, as Ernest Crocker liked to say, highly objectionable.
A tentative sniff confirms that it is awful, but it’s not what I had expected. This particular version landed far afield of Lovell’s original diarrheal objective. Dalton just returned from the Milpitas, California, dump, and the smell takes her straight back there. It’s sulfury, but not in a jokey-farty rotten egg way. It’s got a meaner, spikier disposition.
Mauté recaps the Who, Me? and reaches under the hood for another bottle. A hand-printed label says Stench Soup and, in larger letters, DO NOT OPEN. In 1998, the Joint Nonlethal Weapons Directorate commissioned Monell to develop a superlative malodorant for clearing buildings or benignly dispersing a violent mob. Stench Soup is what Dalton’s team came up with.
Mauté holds the cap in front of my face. Dalton takes two steps backward, anticipating the moment when the smell climbs from its hole. It’s bad, gag-bad. It’s Satan on a throne of rotting onions. Mauté quickly closes it and puts the container back.
“Put the hood down,” Dalton says, calmly but firmly. And then, less calmly: “PUT THE HOOD DOWN.”
It seems like a good time to go out and get some lunch. I follow the pair to a nearby oyster house to hear the story of how the world’s most objectionable smell, the mixture known as Stench Soup, came to be.
It began with a confection called US Government Standard Bathroom Malodor. (The government being the developer of the smell, not its natural source.) The smell was developed during World War II as part of an effort to create a compound for deodorizing field latrines. I have seen old photographs of these: the row of grinning GIs, naked rear ends slung over a log fence rail erected above a pit. To test the various deodorizers they concocted, Army chemists needed to re-create the stench in the lab. It was apparently unique. “Open field latrines used by hundreds of men over an extended time, often in sweltering heat, don’t resemble very well what occurs in a typical residential bathroom,” says Michael Calandra, of the flavor and fragrance company Firmenich. Firmenich has an entire “library” of malodors available to industry for testing cleaning products and deodorizers.
“So we took Bathroom Malodor,” Dalton says, forking something trimethylaminey, “and we sweetened it up a little.” The inspiration was provided by a panicked Las Vegas hotel owner who had telephoned Dalton after his sewage pipes backed up. The addition of the flowery-smelling cleaning product he’d used had made the smell yet more odious.
Mauté reveals the other reason Stench Soup includes a fruity top note. “Most people when they do an initial sniff, it’s shallow. And then if the top note is pleasant, they’re willing to embrace it.”
Dalton jumps in. “So the sweet note hits you, and you inhale more deeply and—” They’re like excited siblings home from a field trip.
“—and that sulfur is just waiting for you on the keeper inhale.”
“And the sulfurs, once they get in your nose? They last. They get trapped in the mucous. They keep rebinding to the same receptors.”
It’s impressive, the ingenuity that goes into a top-flight noxious-smelling substance. The British S liquid included a compound that delayed the onset of the odor, thereby “improving the chances of the operator being able to escape before the smell was detected.”
Would that wars could be fought and won this way—with weapons that didn’t kill or harm. If sacrificing lives for the larger good of nation or cause were not part of the moral equation, imagine the enterprise that would have gone into morale-sapping instead of atom-splitting and armor-piercing. In the same delightful category as Stench Soup, we have the brainchild of Bob Crane, a materials engineer at a research lab at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base who attended a nonlethal weapons brainstorming session during Operation Desert Storm.
Crane set the scene for his idea. The enemy is hunkered down, taking fire. Days go by. The supply lines are cut off. The men are hungry, lonely, angry. Now you introduce the secret weapon: the nostalgic aroma of fresh-baked bread. Crane is an expert in microencapsulation, the technology behind, among many other things, scratch ’n’ sniff. It’s possible to encapsulate a scent in tiny grains of a powder that could then be dropped over the enemy position while the fighters sleep. The next day they walk over the microcapsules, breaking them open and releasing the scent. It’s too much. They miss home, they miss their mother, they decide to desert.
AS CROCKER promised, SAC-23 stank “lastingly.” No one knew this better than the quality control testers of Maryland Research Laboratories, to which the OSS had shipped off a box of two-inch lead tubes of it. “Almost without exception,” states the report, “the operator was contaminated when squirting the contents of the tube.”