iSmell

no time for this, shure we do so. By the way, everyone these uh, I know that when we started releasing these, they were in the regular stuff you should know feed on Wednesdays, and then also in a standalone, uh short ease feed, and I think we just weren't quite sure how to handle that. And now we're just gonna stop that other one and just let them live here in the main feed, right where they've been all along. But we're gonna send our old little standalone friend out to

pasture and shoot it right. All of which means to say is, if you are only sub scribed weirdly to that one thing and not the regular feed, just come on over and join us on the regular feed. We're bringing them home, baby, all right. So here's our dirty secret. As we we talked about this one time in a single live event that no one listening saw. That's exactly right, and it was such an interesting little piece of internet tidbit lower. Yeah, it's so perfect for this it just

cannot be left alone. So yeah, we we decided we were going to talk about the I smell Little I, Big smell. That was their slogan. That was so Yeah, it is like a little lie because it was tied into that whole like Apple push of the late nineties early two thousands, when Apple was riding high and untouchable. Yeah, I guess they didn't. You can't trademark something like that, right, I guess not because of a little I, because every everyone or not everyone, But it seems like it's been

co opted since then. Sure there's like I Home does all their like accessories, and yeah, clearly companies that are not getting any kind of approval from Apple has that whole eye thing going on. Yeah, so the I smell just very simply was a little I guess you would call it a peripheral, a little device that you would put on your desk, plug into your computer via USB, and then when you're browsing the Internet, depending on what kind of website you would come across, it would squirt

out a cent that matched what you're looking at. Maybe not I not squirt, maybe more like waft. Oh. It was probably like a like what do you call those the little perfume atomizer? Yeah, yeah, yeah, not like one of those those trick flowers that like they didn't like squirt some oil onto your face that wouldn't come off or any You're like, oh, why did I visit Nappa

autoparts dot com? Right right? Glube. So the problem with it was not what it was or what it did, because if you stop and think about it, that's that's pretty awesome, or how it worked. Right, we'll get into like the nuts and bolt of it. But it was a revolutionary device, amazing. It's some people say that it was simply ahead of its time, and then it was still simply ahead of its time. Other people say that just from the get go it was ill like the

definition of ill conceived. Yeah, so shall we go back to the es, Yes, that the dot com bubble was riding high grunges in in decline. Yeah, it was. If it's like kind of mid nineties, what was coming out at what came after grunge. Eminem. Oh, I don't even know what that is. You know who Eminem is? I have no idea. Okay, well I was, well it's spelled out you see E M, I N E m oh Eminem the the guy, the rapper guy. That's right. Yeah.

I thought that was like M and M was some sort of style of music that I just didn't know. Oh no, no, no, you know I'm talking like eminem. All right, So the dot coms are in full effect, and if everyone remembers that time, there was just a lot of money being thrown around all over the place where any great new Internet related idea for sure. And I think these guys a pair of dudes named Joel Bellensen and Dexter Smith who went on to form um What was the name of their company. I think it

was digit Sense, digit Sense, that's right, Okay. They they formed digit Sense with twenty million dollars god in um venture capital. And there's this really great everybody go read this article. It's a Wired article from and it it just does a profile of them in their company, and they have like this venture capitalist dude who's like the prototype for the Silicon Valley VC guy. It was like he's the guy, he's the archetype. It's amazing just to see him appear and be like this, this is the

first guy. He's like patient zero, the original hoodie where exactly amazing. So these guys UM they got together and they formed this company called Digitsance, and apparently it was based on a couple of things they had already they were they were pretty well off UM having written some software for genetics databases. Yeah, and this is the nineties, right, so these guys were one of the few, if not

the first, to do this, so they were set. But that experience had also kind of given them a um an awareness of genetics and um digitization, and they realized, like you can you can code something as as organic

as DNA. And they had that little little bit in their pipe that they were smoking when they were down on Miami Beach one day on vacation together and they started smelling perfumes everywhere, as the legend goes, Yes, so the story goes, they smelled many different perfume e since in the air and said, I've got a great idea. I know how we can lose twenty million dollars of someone else's money. Digital scenting, which is why they called

their their company dig Sense. Uh. And like you said, because they already had this sort of genetic h digitizing things relating to genetics down pat they they I don't think, had too hard of a time transferring that to the fact that, uh, we talked about this on our own on longer stuff you should know is that specific odorant molecules fit together perfectly with specific proteins attached to olfactory receptors.

In other words, go listen to our episode on smell precisely right, So you it wasn't the I guess it would have been the smell one. Yeah. It was either that or the China's Yes, them probably. So these guys knew that going into this, or they went and I think did the research, but they're like, oh, we can we can work with that. We can take this and turn it into a digital representation, a digital model of an odorant. And not only can we do it once,

we can do it thousands of times. So the first step these guys took was to create, from what I understand, the world's first database of digitized sense. That you could go into this database and be like, Okay, here's the code for gardenia, and you it's this odorant and that odorant and you put it together. And if you can basically print out an actual odorant and put them together into your brain, you will smell guardenia. Even though this

is not from Earth or nature. It's totally digitized. And that alone, Chuck is like, hats off to these cats for doing that. But that was step one towards um digit sense. I smell release. That's right, and we're gonna take a quick break and come back with the master stroke. That was step two right after this. All right, so we're back. The brilliant master stroke that I teased really was brilliant. And all this was the fact that they

could do the digitizing of scent alone was great. But they sort of learned just like color combinations, uh, in order to pump out any smell you wanted to someone sitting in their cubicle via the Internet, they didn't have to come up with millions of different smells. They could lean on those one d and twenty eight primary odorans and combined him in whatever way they saw fit to make specific odorance like billions and billions of different sense

just from those hundred and twenty eight primary odorance. It is really smart. It was, because up to that point, it's like, Okay, this is a good idea, but how can you get billions of different scents into a little desktop peripheral You can't. So the ability to break it down into just a palette of eight. Now, all of a sudden, the I smell is starting to become an actual reality. And from what I remember, they um the

I smell itself was actually kind of cool looking. If you ask me, it looks like an apple um alien wind sale or something like that solar sale. But the UM, I think it the tray heated up the specific odor and then a fan blew across it, and not only would it heat up one odorant, it would heat up you know, different combinations to different degrees, and the wind that or the fan would blow across it, and then that's what would waft out of the I smell. That's right.

So you load a web page with pixels that have those scent instructions. You're on a web page for a landscaping service, and they decided it's a great idea to give you the scent of fresh cut grass as you visit their website or if you're at a travel agent site. Because this is back then when people still use travel agents, they would squirt out maybe some coconut and suntan lotion, but not squirt waft. And basically the idea was to

enrich your Internet experience. Uh cost about two bucks. I think the cartridges were about fifty but they last months and months sure, which is you know, that's not a terrible price for something, not at all? Uh. And it worked great. They tested it. It worked fine. What they didn't do was consumer testing, That is, does anyone want to smell the Internet? No? That was these guys did

so much R and D and so much um. They were so heads down on the ice all that The fatal flaw of the whole thing was they didn't stop to ask themselves do people want this? They just presumed, yes, this thing is so awesome, it's so revolutionary, and there's so much development put into it. Of course, everybody's gonna watch the price tags, right, it doesn't slow down your web page. The pixels that they created with the sent

information were so efficient. It took up I think two bytes of space, which is like a se of Google's tracking pixel. Everything about it it was perfect, but no one wanted it. It's it was just as plain as day except for me. I've always wanted one of these. Yeah. They actually debuted at the two thousand one uh C e S Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, which is where all the big products make their splash. Um. Nobody liked it. Everyone hated it. They never sold a single one, and

twenty million dollars in VC funds went down. The scented drain. Yep, there was There was at least one prototype, and you can see pictures of it on the internet, but as far as anyone knows, that was it. They never built one. They certainly never sold one. Pretty amazing. And then in two thousand six, PC World said this is this can't be forgotten, and they released their list of the twenty five worse tech products of all time. And believe me, there's been a lot of worse tech products, but the

I Smell was included on that list and was honored forever. Amazing. Yep, the I Smell. All right, Well that's it. Yeah, if you want to get in touch with us, you can go to our website stuff you should Know dot com and check out all of our social links. There you can also send us in Jerry and email to Stuff podcasts at how stuff works dot com from