Capturing scents of the past

NEW YORK • Anxiety sweat. Horse-hair. Wet grass and soil after rain. Sulphuric compounds from gunpowder. Eau de cologne containing rosemary, bergamot and bitter orange. A touch of leather.

This might have been what Napoleon's retreat from the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 smelled like.

At least, these are some of the elements Ms Caro Verbeek, an art historian and olfactory researcher, tried to incorporate when she was reconstructing the smell, in partnership with perfumer Birgit Sijbrands, scent designer Bernardo Fleming of International Flavors & Fragrances and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

"Wars are extremely smelly. Soldiers don't write about injuries as much as they write about the terrible sounds and smells, so we know more about them," she said.

They also knew it had rained the night before the battle, that anxiety sweat smells different from normal sweat, and that there were thousands of horses on the field. And they were aware of the ingredients of Napoleon's perfume - he wore litres of it every day and carried a bottle in his boot.

These were some details Ms Verbeek relied on for the reconstruction, as part of a project called In Search Of Lost Scents. The scent is offered in the Rijksmuseum as part of tours - on strips of paper or in a necklace with tiny pumps - alongside Jan Willem Pieneman's 1824 painting of the scene.

In the growing field of smell research, scientists, artists, historians and cultural heritage specialists are coming together to work on what is perhaps the trickiest sense to preserve.

Some are working on trying to conserve the smells of the times. Others, like Ms Verbeek, are working on reconstructing some of the lost scents.

These are some of the areas that Odeuropa, a research consortium on olfactory heritage that was awarded a €2.8 million (S$4.5 million) grant, is focused on studying.

Ms Inger Leemans, a cultural heritage professor and project leader of Odeuropa, said: "We're also asking, what are the fragrant places of our countries or Europe?"

She added: "We're losing them fast because time never stops, but is it valid to try to safeguard those places or reconstruct them? How do you bring the past to the nose?"

History is rife with smells people will never be able to reclaim.

Despite the detailed efforts of Ms Verbeek, they will never really know what the Battle of Waterloo smelled like. They may not even be able to recapture the smells of their childhoods.

Many scents that are vanishing include mothballs, burning piles of leaves in autumn and typewriter ribbons.

Although technology has made it easier to isolate the chemical compounds of a smell, odours are also highly context dependent.

But preserving smell requires more than just olfactory data.

Ms Cecilia Bembibre, a researcher at the Institute for Sustainable Heritage at University College London, is working on a systematic means of archiving smell, using chemistry and qualitative tools. She has done this for the smell of old books.

The field of scent research is gaining recognition, but smell has long been less studied than the other senses. "It's gaining ground, but it's a bit of an oddity," she said.

NYTIMES