Worst smell

Carboxylic adds are often foul smeUing. For instance, butyric acid is one of the worst smelling compounds imaginable. 

The chemicals in skunk spray, all contain sulfur. This may be the world s worst smell. 

In France, local municipalities with one foul-smelling factory had the power to ban the construction of additional chemical plants. Napoleon also decreed that all factories emitting unpleasant odors should be rated according to the seriousness of the problem. When Leblanc factories got some of the worst scores, they were banned near human habitation. Later, however, both Leblanc and Lavoisier became French national heroes, martyrs of progress. Factory towns named streets after Leblanc, and industrialists commissioned his statue. In 1856—at the peak of the Leblanc pollution in... 

But perhaps the worst aroma was that which caused the evacuation of the city of Freiburg in 1889. Attempts to make thioacetone by the cracking of trithioacetone gave rise to an offensive smell which spread rapidly over a great area of the town causing fainting, vomiting and a panic evacuation°the laboratory work was abandoned . 

By the way, all these nice, tidy analogies do not extend to the smells possessed by most amines. Whereas alcohols tend to have, at worst, somewhat heavy,. sweetish odors amines, at best, smell like ammonia, and, at worst, richly deserve the common names that have been bestowed upon some of their representatives. Thc.se include names like cadaverinc, putre.scinc, and skatole. Dead fish would be an improvement. 

The virtues of water are its availability, cheapness, lack of smell, nontoxicity and non-flammability. However, it is not an ideal paint liquid, because of its limited miscibility with other liquids and because the film-formers designed to be dissolved or dispersed in it usually remain permanently sensitive to it. In fact, its abundance in nature makes it any paint film s worst enemy, since it is always around to cause swelling of the film, hydrolysis and substrate corrosion. 

R. Jaslow, New Car Smell Is Toxic, Study Says Which Cars Are Worst CBS News, February 15, 2012. 

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