Odor amplifier

Odor amplifier is the plausible, but fictitious, invention of mechanical engineer Thomas A. McMahon that is described in his 1970 novel, Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry: A Novel, in which it is invented by a character modeled on Richard Feynman. It is described as a device that looks like a medicine dropper suspended above a beaker. Small drops of metallic mercury fall from the dropper into the beaker below.^[1]

"The growing drop adsorbs the faint odors of the room on its surface,...but when it falls into the beaker it gives up most of its surface area. Most of the odor is then released back into the air, but it stays in the beaker above the surface of the mercury, because odors are heavier than air."

In reality, the odor amplifier fails: The droplets are not exposed in flight for long enough to acquire any perceptible odors, and, if small enough, they tend to bounce off of the liquid surface and out of the beaker.

References

1. ^ Thomas A. McMahon, Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry: A Novel (1970), Little, Brown and Company, ISBN 0-226-56110-0, p. 196