Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: iSmell

Episode Date: November 28, 2018

Two men once had a dream - to add smell to the internet. And they almost gave it to us. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, and welcome to this short stuff, Shorties, there's Chuck, there's Jerry, I'm Josh, we're all feeling kind of short, so this is short stuff. I'm feeling tall. Are you? Sure, why not? I always feel like I'm 6'3". How tall are you? Oh, I used to be 5'10", now I'm like 5'9.5".

Oh wait, I just realized this is a short stuff. We have no time for this. Sure we do. So by the way, everyone, I know that when we started releasing these, they were in the regular stuff you should know feed on Wednesdays, and then also in a standalone Shorties feed. And I think we just weren't quite sure how to handle that, and now we're just gonna stop that other one and just let them live here in the main feed, right, where they've been all along, but we're gonna send our old little standalone friend out to pasture and shoot

it. All of which means to say is if you are only subscribed weirdly to that one thing and not the regular feed, just come on over and join us on the regular feed. We're bringing them home, baby. All right, so here's our dirty secret is we talked about this one time in a single live event that no one listening saw. That's exactly right, and it was such an interesting little piece of internet tidbit lore. Yeah, it's so perfect for this.

It just could not be left alone. So yeah, we decided we were gonna talk about the eye smell. Little eye, big smell. That was their slogan. So yeah, it is like a little lie because it was tied into that whole like Apple push of the late 90s, early 2000s when Apple was riding high and untouchable. Yeah, I guess they didn't, you can't trademark something like that, right? I guess not.

You have a little eye because everyone, well, not everyone, but seems like it's been co-opted since then. Sure, there's like eye-homed as all their like accessories and yeah, clearly companies that are not getting any kind of approval from Apple has that whole eye thing going on. Yeah, so the eye smell just very simply was a little, I guess you would call it a peripheral, a little device that you would put on your desk, plug into your computer via USB and then when you're browsing the internet, depending on what kind of website you would come across,

it would squirt out a scent that matched what you're looking at. Maybe not squirt, maybe more like waft. Oh, it was probably like a, what do you call those, the little perfume atomizer? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It was one of those trick flowers that like squirts, they didn't like squirt some oil onto your face that wouldn't come off or anything like that. Like, oh, why did I visit napaautoparts.com?

Right, right, it's glub. So the problem with it was not what it was or what it did because if you stop and think about it, that's pretty awesome. Yeah, or how it worked. Right, we'll get into like the nuts and bolts of it, but it was a revolutionary device. Yeah. It was a revolutionary thing. Some people say that it was simply ahead of its time and that it was still simply ahead

of its time. Other people say that just from the get-go, it was like the definition of ill-conceived. Yeah. So shall we go back to the 1990s? Yes. That the dot-com bubble is riding high, grunges in decline. Yeah, it was. If it's like kind of mid-90s.

What was coming out? It came after grunge, Eminem. Oh, I don't even know what that is. You know who Eminem is. I have no idea. Okay. Well, I'm pretty sure. What was that saying for?

Well, it's spelled out, you see. E-M-I-N-E-M. Oh, Eminem, the guy, the rapper guy. That's right. Yeah, I thought it was like Eminem was some sort of style of music that I just didn't know about. Oh, no, no, no. I'm talking like Eminem.

All right. The dot-coms are in full effect and if everyone remembers that time, that was just a lot of money being thrown around all over the place for any great new internet related idea. For sure. And I think these guys, a pair of dudes named Joel Bellenson and Dexter Smith who went on to form, what was the name of their company? I think it was DigiSense. DigiSense, that's right, okay.

They form DigiSense with $20 million in venture capital and there's this really great, everybody go read this article. It's a Wired article from 1999 and it just does a profile of them and their company and they have this venture capitalist dude who's the prototype for the Silicon Valley VC guy. It was like, he's the guy, he's the archetype. It's amazing. Just to see him appear and be like, this is 1999, this is the first guy, he's like patient zero.

Yeah. The original hoodie wearer. Exactly. Amazing. So these guys, they got together and they formed this company called DigiSense and apparently it was based on a couple of things. They had already, they were pretty well off having written some software for genetics databases.

Yeah. And this is the 90s, right? So these guys were one of the few, if not the first to do this. So they were set, but that experience had also kind of given them an awareness of genetics and digitization and they realized like you can code something as organic as DNA and they had that little bit in their pipe that they were smoking when they were down on Miami Beach one day on vacation together and they started smelling perfumes everywhere as the legend goes.

Yes. So the story goes, they smelled many different perfumy scents in the air and said, I've got a great idea. I know how we can lose $20 million of someone else's money. Digital scinting, which is why they called their company DigiSense. And like you said, because they already had this sort of genetic digitizing things relating to genetics down pat, they, they, I don't think had too hard of a time transferring that to the fact that, we talked about this on our own, on longer stuff, you should know,

that specific odorant molecules fit together perfectly with specific proteins attached to olfactory receptors. In other words, go listen to our episode on smell. Precisely. And so you, was it the, I guess it would have been the smell one. Oh yeah. It was either that or the China's. Pollution sniffers?

Yes, them. Yeah, probably both. So these guys knew that going into this or they, they went and I think did the research, but they're like, oh, we can, we can work with that. We can take this and turn it into a digital representation or a digital model of an odorant. And not only can we do it once, we can do it thousands of times. So the first step these guys took was to create from what I understand, the world's first database of digitized sense that you could go into this database and be like, oh, okay,

here's the code for gardenia and you, it's this odorant and that odorant and you put it together. And if you can basically print out an actual odorant and put them together into your brain, you will smell gardenia, even though this is not from earth or nature, it's totally digitized. And that alone, Chuck, is like hats off to these cats for doing that. But that was step one toward digit sense, I smell release. That's right. And we're going to take a quick break and come back with the master stroke that was

step two right after this. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help.

This I promise you. Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael, um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that Michael and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in

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I'm a singer-songwriter in Nashville, Tennessee, and I host a podcast called Too Much to Say, which is very aptly titled. I write songs most of the time, but I can't keep my feelings to three minutes and 30 seconds. So to have a whole podcast, it's just amazing. So I share stories from my music career, my childhood. I've been known to read diary entries, play unreleased songs, but no matter what I'm doing, I'm sharing a strong opinion I have on something. So I share my thoughts on everything from music to martinis, social media to social anxiety,

regrets to risky texts, and so much more. Songs that even have some really special guests on to share their craziness and what they have too much to say about. So you guys can listen to new episodes of Too Much to Say every Wednesday on the Nashville Podcast Network. Available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. All right. So we're back, the brilliant master stroke that I teased really was brilliant and all

this was. The fact that they could do the digitizing of scent alone was great. But they sort of learned just like color combinations, in order to pump out any smell you wanted to to someone sitting in their cubicle via the internet, they didn't have to come up with millions of different smells. They could lean on those 128 primary odorants and combine them in whatever way they saw fit to make specific odorants. Like billions and billions of different scents just from those 128 primary odorants.

It was really smart. It was because up to that point, it's like, okay, this is a good idea, but how can you get billions of different scents into a little desktop peripheral? You can't. The ability to break it down into just a pallet of 128, now all of a sudden, the eye smell is starting to become an actual reality. And from what I remember, the eye smell itself was actually kind of cool looking, if you ask me.

It looks like an Apple alien wind sale or something like that, solar sale. But I think the tray heated up the specific odorant and then a fan blew across it. But not only would it heat up one odorant, it would heat up different combinations to different degrees and the fan would blow across it and then that's what would waft out of the eye smell. That's right. So you load a webpage with pixels that have those scent instructions. You're on a webpage for a landscaping service and they decide it's a great idea to give

you the scent of fresh cut grass as you visit their website. Or if you're at a travel agent site, because this is back then when people still use travel agents, they would squirt out maybe some coconut and suntan lotion. But not squirt, waft. And basically the idea was to enrich your internet experience, cost about 200 bucks. I think the cartridges were about 50. But they'd last months and months. Sure.

Which is, you know, that's not a terrible price for something. Not at all. And it worked great. They tested it. It worked fine. What they wanted to do was consumer testing. That is, does anyone want to smell the internet? No.

These guys did so much R&D and so much, they were so heads down on the eye smell that the fatal flaw of the whole thing was they didn't stop to ask themselves, do people want this? They just presumed, yes, this thing is so awesome. It's so revolutionary. And there's so much development put into it. Of course everybody's going to want the price tags right. It doesn't slow down your web page. The pixels that they created with the send information were so efficient, it took up

I think two bytes of space, which is like a 17th of Google's tracking pixel. Everything about it. It was perfect, but no one wanted it. It was just as plain as day, except for me. I've always wanted one of these. Yeah. They actually debuted at the 2001 CES consumer electronics show in Vegas, which is where all the big products make their splash.

Nobody liked it. Everyone hated it. They never sold a single one and $20 million in VC funds went down the scented drain. Yep. There was at least one prototype and you can see pictures of it on the internet, but as far as anyone knows, that was it. They never built one. They certainly never sold one.

Pretty amazing. Even in 2006, PC World said, this can't be forgotten. They released their list of the 25 worst tech products of all time. Believe me, there's been a lot of worst tech products, but the iSmell was included on that list and was honored forever. Amazing. Yep. The iSmell.

All right. That's it. That's it. Yeah. If you want to get in touch with us, you can go to our website, StuffYouShouldKnow.com and check out all of our social links there. You can also send us and Jerry an email to stuffpodcastathousestuffworks.com. On the podcast, hey dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the

cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.