Patently Alarming Olfactory Developments

“Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum! I smell the blood of an Englishman!” Thus begins Chapter 6 of Whiff! The Revolution of Scent Communication in the Information Age, Danger, Will Robinson. The familiar line from Jack and the Beanstalk draws a perfectly clear picture of how scent acts as a warning signal. The giant had obviously experienced some prior encounter involving light-fingered Brits and golden goose eggs, a negative experience which generated a lifelong dislike for the smell of Englishmen and imprinted a permanent danger or warning response which would be triggered by their natural aroma. This danger scent phenomenon is indeed a figurative goose that will lay endless golden eggs for enterprising entrepreneurs in the years to come…notably, inventors Richard E. Krock, Karl F. Rauscher, Stuart Owen Goldman, and Carlos Curtis Solari, who applied last week for Patent #20100117828. Their alarm scheme with olfactory alerting component is “an alarm system integrating the sense of smell (i.e., an olfactory component) as an alerting modality is described. The olfactory component is uniquely recognizable and distinguishable from traditional visual or audible alerting components and can be used to increase the number of separate alarms that a person can respond to and/or decrease the reaction time for responding to the alarms.”