| "Recently we found ourselves with an odour problem beyond our worst expectations. During early experiments, a stopper jumped from a bottle of
residues, and, although replaced at once, resulted in an immediate complaint of nausea and sickness from colleagues working in a building two hundred
yards away. Two of our chemists who had done no more than investigate the cracking of minute amounts of trithioacetone found themselves the object of
hostile stares in a restaurant and suffered the humiliation of having a waitress spray the area around them with a deodorant. The odours defied the
expected effects of dilution since workers in the laboratory did not find the odours intolerable ... and genuinely denied responsibility since they
were working in closed systems. To convince them otherwise, they were dispersed with other observers around the laboratory, at distances up to a
quarter of a mile, and one drop of either acetone gem-dithiol or the mother liquors from crude trithioacetone crystallisations were placed on a watch
glass in a fume cupboard. The odour was detected downwind in seconds." |
