Word: mercaptan
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...butyl mercaptan is a light petroleum liquid whose skunklike odor is so foul that it is used for detecting leaks in natural-gas pipelines. Now a Texas entrepreneur named J.W. Small is promoting it as a rape repellent. Rapel, as his $9.95 product is called, is an inch-long plastic cylinder that contains a fragile glass ampoule of the obnoxious fluid. The pencil-thick device can be clipped to the inside of a dress, bra or nightgown; when pressed lightly, the ampoule breaks, releasing the ardor-killing odor. One rape crisis expert frets that Rapel "lulls the user into...
...secret is an afterburner developed by the Blu-Surf Division of Hayes-Albion Co. of Jackson, Mich., and installed on a stack of the S.D. Warren Co., a paper mill whose emissions have long irritated Muskegon residents. Paper mills smell because they emit sulfide and methyl-mercaptan gases. Instead of venting those gases into the air, the destinking system sends them into a special furnace fed by pressurized air and natural gas. The fumes are then forced through a flame that burns at 1350° F., which is the oxidation point of the sulfides and mercaptans. The resultant oxides...
...countless chemicals in his photo lab-but which one? Working day and night under the red darkroom lights, he dabbled with hundreds of dyes and compounds. Finally, on Dec. 7, 1961, he reached up among the rows of bottles and picked a rarely used mixture called mercaptan l-phenyl-5-mercaptotetrazole. When he swabbed the mixture on the film and then developed it, recalls Blake, "it was like going to the race track and hitting the daily double." The payoff: a major advance in photography...
Having made a specialty of the subject, the authors have acquired a certain affection for bad smells. They tell with considerable sympathy how smelly chemicals often save human lives. For example, when a mine has an accident, the operators often dump ethyl mercaptan (which smells like rotting cabbage, garlic, onions and sewer gas) into its air supply. The awful stench circulates quickly through every passage and forcefully warns the miners to run for their lives...
...Granite Mountain Shaft, Butte, Mont., where 13 years ago 162 men lost their lives in a fire because warning was not spread quickly enough. At first pleasant odors were used but were not successful. Workmen did not run when they .sniffed violets or roses. But when experimenters released butyl mercaptan which smells like garlic, miners dropped their tools at once, raced for the exit. The stench safety method has been adopted by the American Standards Association which suggests to mine operators how best to conserve their employes' lives. Although the U.S. Bureau of Mines cannot force operators to obey American...