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Short Stuff: iSmell · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. Shorties. There's Chuck,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: there's Jerry. I'm Josh. We're all feeling kind of short.
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: So this is short stuff. I'm feeling a tall are
• 0:14
  Speaker 1: you sure? Why not? I always feel like I'm six three?
• 0:19
  Speaker 1: How tall are you? Oh? I used to be five ten.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: Now I'm like five nine and a half. Oh wait,
• 0:23
  Speaker 1: I just realized this is a short stuff. We have
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: no time for this, shure we do so. By the way,
• 0:30
  Speaker 1: everyone these uh, I know that when we started releasing these,
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: they were in the regular stuff you should know feed
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: on Wednesdays, and then also in a standalone, uh short
• 0:40
  Speaker 1: ease feed, and I think we just weren't quite sure
• 0:43
  Speaker 1: how to handle that. And now we're just gonna stop
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: that other one and just let them live here in
• 0:46
  Speaker 1: the main feed, right where they've been all along. But
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: we're gonna send our old little standalone friend out to
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: pasture and shoot it right. All of which means to
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: say is, if you are only sub scribed weirdly to
• 1:01
  Speaker 1: that one thing and not the regular feed, just come
• 1:05
  Speaker 1: on over and join us on the regular feed. We're
• 1:07
  Speaker 1: bringing them home, baby, all right. So here's our dirty secret.
• 1:11
  Speaker 1: As we we talked about this one time in a
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: single live event that no one listening saw. That's exactly right,
• 1:19
  Speaker 1: and it was such an interesting little piece of internet
• 1:23
  Speaker 1: tidbit lower. Yeah, it's so perfect for this it just
• 1:26
  Speaker 1: cannot be left alone. So yeah, we we decided we
• 1:28
  Speaker 1: were going to talk about the I smell Little I,
• 1:33
  Speaker 1: Big smell. That was their slogan. That was so Yeah,
• 1:37
  Speaker 1: it is like a little lie because it was tied
• 1:39
  Speaker 1: into that whole like Apple push of the late nineties
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: early two thousands, when Apple was riding high and untouchable. Yeah,
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: I guess they didn't. You can't trademark something like that, right,
• 1:51
  Speaker 1: I guess not because of a little I, because every
• 1:53
  Speaker 1: everyone or not everyone, But it seems like it's been
• 1:55
  Speaker 1: co opted since then. Sure there's like I Home does
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: all their like accessories, and yeah, clearly companies that are
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: not getting any kind of approval from Apple has that
• 2:06
  Speaker 1: whole eye thing going on. Yeah, so the I smell
• 2:11
  Speaker 1: just very simply was a little I guess you would
• 2:14
  Speaker 1: call it a peripheral, a little device that you would
• 2:17
  Speaker 1: put on your desk, plug into your computer via USB,
• 2:21
  Speaker 1: and then when you're browsing the Internet, depending on what
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: kind of website you would come across, it would squirt
• 2:28
  Speaker 1: out a cent that matched what you're looking at. Maybe
• 2:33
  Speaker 1: not I not squirt, maybe more like waft. Oh. It
• 2:37
  Speaker 1: was probably like a like what do you call those
• 2:40
  Speaker 1: the little perfume atomizer? Yeah, yeah, yeah, not like one
• 2:43
  Speaker 1: of those those trick flowers that like they didn't like
• 2:48
  Speaker 1: squirt some oil onto your face that wouldn't come off
• 2:50
  Speaker 1: or any You're like, oh, why did I visit Nappa
• 2:53
  Speaker 1: autoparts dot com? Right right? Glube. So the problem with
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: it was not what it was or what it did,
• 3:03
  Speaker 1: because if you stop and think about it, that's that's
• 3:05
  Speaker 1: pretty awesome, or how it worked. Right, we'll get into
• 3:08
  Speaker 1: like the nuts and bolt of it. But it was
• 3:10
  Speaker 1: a revolutionary device, amazing. It's some people say that it
• 3:15
  Speaker 1: was simply ahead of its time, and then it was
• 3:17
  Speaker 1: still simply ahead of its time. Other people say that
• 3:20
  Speaker 1: just from the get go it was ill like the
• 3:24
  Speaker 1: definition of ill conceived. Yeah, so shall we go back
• 3:27
  Speaker 1: to the es, Yes, that the dot com bubble was
• 3:32
  Speaker 1: riding high grunges in in decline. Yeah, it was. If
• 3:38
  Speaker 1: it's like kind of mid nineties, what was coming out
• 3:40
  Speaker 1: at what came after grunge. Eminem. Oh, I don't even
• 3:44
  Speaker 1: know what that is. You know who Eminem is? I
• 3:47
  Speaker 1: have no idea. Okay, well I was, well it's spelled
• 3:52
  Speaker 1: out you see E M, I N E m oh
• 3:57
  Speaker 1: Eminem the the guy, the rapper guy. That's right. Yeah.
• 4:00
  Speaker 1: I thought that was like M and M was some
• 4:02
  Speaker 1: sort of style of music that I just didn't know.
• 4:05
  Speaker 1: Oh no, no, no, you know I'm talking like eminem.
• 4:08
  Speaker 1: All right, So the dot coms are in full effect,
• 4:11
  Speaker 1: and if everyone remembers that time, there was just a
• 4:14
  Speaker 1: lot of money being thrown around all over the place
• 4:18
  Speaker 1: where any great new Internet related idea for sure. And
• 4:22
  Speaker 1: I think these guys a pair of dudes named Joel
• 4:25
  Speaker 1: Bellensen and Dexter Smith who went on to form um
• 4:29
  Speaker 1: What was the name of their company. I think it
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: was digit Sense, digit Sense, that's right, Okay. They they
• 4:36
  Speaker 1: formed digit Sense with twenty million dollars god in um
• 4:40
  Speaker 1: venture capital. And there's this really great everybody go read
• 4:44
  Speaker 1: this article. It's a Wired article from and it it
• 4:48
  Speaker 1: just does a profile of them in their company, and
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: they have like this venture capitalist dude who's like the
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: prototype for the Silicon Valley VC guy. It was like
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: he's the guy, he's the archetype. It's amazing just to
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: see him appear and be like this, this is the
• 5:08
  Speaker 1: first guy. He's like patient zero, the original hoodie where
• 5:12
  Speaker 1: exactly amazing. So these guys UM they got together and
• 5:17
  Speaker 1: they formed this company called Digitsance, and apparently it was
• 5:20
  Speaker 1: based on a couple of things they had already they
• 5:24
  Speaker 1: were they were pretty well off UM having written some
• 5:27
  Speaker 1: software for genetics databases. Yeah, and this is the nineties, right,
• 5:32
  Speaker 1: so these guys were one of the few, if not
• 5:34
  Speaker 1: the first, to do this, so they were set. But
• 5:37
  Speaker 1: that experience had also kind of given them a um
• 5:41
  Speaker 1: an awareness of genetics and um digitization, and they realized,
• 5:48
  Speaker 1: like you can you can code something as as organic
• 5:52
  Speaker 1: as DNA. And they had that little little bit in
• 5:55
  Speaker 1: their pipe that they were smoking when they were down
• 5:57
  Speaker 1: on Miami Beach one day on vacation together and they
• 6:00
  Speaker 1: started smelling perfumes everywhere, as the legend goes, Yes, so
• 6:04
  Speaker 1: the story goes, they smelled many different perfume e since
• 6:08
  Speaker 1: in the air and said, I've got a great idea.
• 6:12
  Speaker 1: I know how we can lose twenty million dollars of
• 6:14
  Speaker 1: someone else's money. Digital scenting, which is why they called
• 6:19
  Speaker 1: their their company dig Sense. Uh. And like you said,
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: because they already had this sort of genetic h digitizing
• 6:28
  Speaker 1: things relating to genetics down pat they they I don't think,
• 6:32
  Speaker 1: had too hard of a time transferring that to the
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: fact that, uh, we talked about this on our own
• 6:38
  Speaker 1: on longer stuff you should know is that specific odorant
• 6:41
  Speaker 1: molecules fit together perfectly with specific proteins attached to olfactory receptors.
• 6:47
  Speaker 1: In other words, go listen to our episode on smell
• 6:50
  Speaker 1: precisely right, So you it wasn't the I guess it
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: would have been the smell one. Yeah. It was either
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: that or the China's Yes, them probably. So these guys
• 7:05
  Speaker 1: knew that going into this, or they went and I
• 7:08
  Speaker 1: think did the research, but they're like, oh, we can
• 7:10
  Speaker 1: we can work with that. We can take this and
• 7:13
  Speaker 1: turn it into a digital representation, a digital model of
• 7:17
  Speaker 1: an odorant. And not only can we do it once,
• 7:20
  Speaker 1: we can do it thousands of times. So the first
• 7:22
  Speaker 1: step these guys took was to create, from what I understand,
• 7:26
  Speaker 1: the world's first database of digitized sense. That you could
• 7:30
  Speaker 1: go into this database and be like, Okay, here's the
• 7:33
  Speaker 1: code for gardenia, and you it's this odorant and that
• 7:37
  Speaker 1: odorant and you put it together. And if you can
• 7:40
  Speaker 1: basically print out an actual odorant and put them together
• 7:45
  Speaker 1: into your brain, you will smell guardenia. Even though this
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: is not from Earth or nature. It's totally digitized. And
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: that alone, Chuck is like, hats off to these cats
• 7:56
  Speaker 1: for doing that. But that was step one towards um
• 7:59
  Speaker 1: digit sense. I smell release. That's right, and we're gonna
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: take a quick break and come back with the master stroke.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: That was step two right after this. All right, so
• 8:32
  Speaker 1: we're back. The brilliant master stroke that I teased really
• 8:36
  Speaker 1: was brilliant. And all this was the fact that they
• 8:38
  Speaker 1: could do the digitizing of scent alone was great. But
• 8:42
  Speaker 1: they sort of learned just like color combinations, uh, in
• 8:46
  Speaker 1: order to pump out any smell you wanted to someone
• 8:48
  Speaker 1: sitting in their cubicle via the Internet, they didn't have
• 8:51
  Speaker 1: to come up with millions of different smells. They could
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: lean on those one d and twenty eight primary odorans
• 8:59
  Speaker 1: and combined him in whatever way they saw fit to
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: make specific odorance like billions and billions of different sense
• 9:08
  Speaker 1: just from those hundred and twenty eight primary odorance. It
• 9:11
  Speaker 1: is really smart. It was, because up to that point,
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: it's like, Okay, this is a good idea, but how
• 9:16
  Speaker 1: can you get billions of different scents into a little
• 9:19
  Speaker 1: desktop peripheral You can't. So the ability to break it
• 9:22
  Speaker 1: down into just a palette of eight. Now, all of
• 9:25
  Speaker 1: a sudden, the I smell is starting to become an
• 9:28
  Speaker 1: actual reality. And from what I remember, they um the
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: I smell itself was actually kind of cool looking. If
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: you ask me, it looks like an apple um alien
• 9:40
  Speaker 1: wind sale or something like that solar sale. But the UM,
• 9:44
  Speaker 1: I think it the tray heated up the specific odor
• 9:47
  Speaker 1: and then a fan blew across it, and not only
• 9:50
  Speaker 1: would it heat up one odorant, it would heat up
• 9:52
  Speaker 1: you know, different combinations to different degrees, and the wind
• 9:56
  Speaker 1: that or the fan would blow across it, and then
• 9:58
  Speaker 1: that's what would waft out of the I smell. That's right.
• 10:01
  Speaker 1: So you load a web page with pixels that have
• 10:03
  Speaker 1: those scent instructions. You're on a web page for a
• 10:08
  Speaker 1: landscaping service, and they decided it's a great idea to
• 10:12
  Speaker 1: give you the scent of fresh cut grass as you
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: visit their website or if you're at a travel agent site.
• 10:18
  Speaker 1: Because this is back then when people still use travel agents,
• 10:21
  Speaker 1: they would squirt out maybe some coconut and suntan lotion,
• 10:25
  Speaker 1: but not squirt waft. And basically the idea was to
• 10:29
  Speaker 1: enrich your Internet experience. Uh cost about two bucks. I
• 10:34
  Speaker 1: think the cartridges were about fifty but they last months
• 10:38
  Speaker 1: and months sure, which is you know, that's not a
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: terrible price for something, not at all? Uh. And it
• 10:43
  Speaker 1: worked great. They tested it. It worked fine. What they
• 10:45
  Speaker 1: didn't do was consumer testing, That is, does anyone want
• 10:50
  Speaker 1: to smell the Internet? No? That was these guys did
• 10:54
  Speaker 1: so much R and D and so much um. They
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: were so heads down on the ice all that The
• 11:01
  Speaker 1: fatal flaw of the whole thing was they didn't stop
• 11:04
  Speaker 1: to ask themselves do people want this? They just presumed, yes,
• 11:08
  Speaker 1: this thing is so awesome, it's so revolutionary, and there's
• 11:10
  Speaker 1: so much development put into it. Of course, everybody's gonna
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: watch the price tags, right, it doesn't slow down your
• 11:16
  Speaker 1: web page. The pixels that they created with the sent
• 11:20
  Speaker 1: information were so efficient. It took up I think two
• 11:23
  Speaker 1: bytes of space, which is like a se of Google's
• 11:27
  Speaker 1: tracking pixel. Everything about it it was perfect, but no
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: one wanted it. It's it was just as plain as
• 11:34
  Speaker 1: day except for me. I've always wanted one of these. Yeah.
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: They actually debuted at the two thousand one uh C
• 11:40
  Speaker 1: e S Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas, which is where
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: all the big products make their splash. Um. Nobody liked it.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: Everyone hated it. They never sold a single one, and
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: twenty million dollars in VC funds went down. The scented drain. Yep,
• 11:58
  Speaker 1: there was There was at least one prototype, and you
• 12:00
  Speaker 1: can see pictures of it on the internet, but as
• 12:02
  Speaker 1: far as anyone knows, that was it. They never built one.
• 12:05
  Speaker 1: They certainly never sold one. Pretty amazing. And then in
• 12:08
  Speaker 1: two thousand six, PC World said this is this can't
• 12:13
  Speaker 1: be forgotten, and they released their list of the twenty
• 12:17
  Speaker 1: five worse tech products of all time. And believe me,
• 12:19
  Speaker 1: there's been a lot of worse tech products, but the
• 12:22
  Speaker 1: I Smell was included on that list and was honored forever. Amazing. Yep,
• 12:28
  Speaker 1: the I Smell. All right, Well that's it. Yeah, if
• 12:32
  Speaker 1: you want to get in touch with us, you can
• 12:34
  Speaker 1: go to our website stuff you should Know dot com
• 12:37
  Speaker 1: and check out all of our social links. There you
• 12:39
  Speaker 1: can also send us in Jerry and email to Stuff
• 12:42
  Speaker 1: podcasts at how stuff works dot com from