Apart from the French, who smell of a vile mixture of cooked snails and stewed frogs' leg combined the with the strong, overpowering whiff of the garlic in which they cook those things in (so strong you can actually smell them in many parts of Kent), the smelliest things in the world are, according to the Guinness Book of Records, the "US Government Standard Bathroom Malodor", a vile mixture of eight chemicals with stench resembling human feces, only much stronger, designed to test the efficacy of
deodorizers and
air fresheners. The other one, "
Who me?", is a mixture of five sulfur-containing chemicals and smells like rotting food and carcasses. "Who-me?" was designed during
World War II, for use by the
French Resistance to humiliate the
German soldiers. Dalton of Monell has combined the worst of the two to make "Stench Soup".
Who Me? was a
top secret sulfurous
stench weapon developed by the American
Office of Strategic Services during
World War II to be used by the
French Resistance against
German officers.
Who Me? smelled strongly of
fecal matter, and was issued in pocket
atomizers intended to be unobtrusively sprayed on a German officer, humiliating him and, by extension, demoralizing the occupying German forces.
The experiment was very short-lived, however.
Who Me? had a high concentration of extremely
volatile sulfur compounds that were very difficult to control: more often than not the person who did the spraying ended up smelling as bad as the sprayee. After only two weeks it was concluded that
Who Me? was a dismal failure. It remains unclear whether there was a successful
Who Me? attack.
Who Me? was listed by the
The Guinness Book of World Records as one of the two smelliest substances, the other being "
US Government Standard Bathroom Malodor", used to test deodorants and air fresheners.
[1] Pam Dalton, a
cognitive psychologist at the
Monell Chemical Senses Center in
Philadelphia, describes the smell of
Who Me? as resembling "the worst garbage dumpster left in the street for a long time in the middle of the hottest summer ever".
A recipe for a kilogram of the same or equivalent substance in circulation on the Internet specifies 919 g of white
mineral oil as an inert carrier, and 20 g of
skatole, 20 g of
n-
butanoic acid, 20 g of
n-
pentanoic acid, 20 g of
n-
hexanoic acid and 1 g of
pentanethiol as the active ingredients.
wikipedia.org