Word: sniffer
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...have dreamed up a way to make it stop a car. Troubled by the steady increase in the number of drunken Japanese drivers and the traffic deaths they cause (1,200 last year), a Honda Motor Co. Ltd. engineer named Kazutaka Monden has developed a puritanical gimmick called the Sniffer that shuts off a car's engine when it detects alcoholic breath...
Installed at the top of the steering column, the Sniffer consists primarily of a thumbnail-sized gas sensor. Whenever the presence of a potentially combustible gas closes the circuit between a pair of tiny electrodes, a yellow panel light flashes. This indicates that the Sniffer has been offended and will cut the ignition in ten seconds-just enough time, its inventor calculates, to allow the motorist to pull off the road...
...equipment, however, it will have to become more discriminating. It is so sensitive that even when a sober companion shifts a drunken driver to the back seat, it refuses to allow the motor to start; it can still sniff the drunk's breath. Still more embarrassing was the Sniffer's recent refusal to allow a sober woman to drive. The mechanism found her perfume intoxicating...
Professor Kilson, the "rat-sniffer," is disgustingly reminiscent of Ralph Ellison's Dr. Bledose. He has, consciously or unconsciously, become the blackguard of the Harvard Faculty on the subject of Afro-American Studies...
...pollution code brought a fresh breeze of hope. Odors injurious to the public welfare were outlawed; the definition of welfare included reasonable enjoyment of life and property. To enforce the code, alas, the city acquired a Scentometer. The device is a plastic box that contains a sensitive mechanical sniffer through which an inspector breathes. This is a scientific means, supposedly, for calibrating stink. But for the past eleven months the Scentometer has gasped through 1,100 tests of the air around Hopfenmaier's and found it legally tolerable. The machine is contradicted by most noses in town...