the abbreviated reign of “neon” leon spinks

BEWARE OF UNPROVEN TECHNOLOGIES 97
tory filmmaking. Since they were added to existing movies, they were an
offense against film aesthetics, a distraction from what the director had
intended audiences to focus upon. Beyond that, the clouds of perfume that
accumulated in theaters created a problem. The human nose, which has
only so many smell receptors, has difficulty transitioning to a new smell
until it is cleared of the molecules that triggered a previous scent. The
result was a phenomenon called “olfactory fatigue,” in which the sense of
smell gradually stops working, like a smoker who no longer notices the
acrid stink of his cigarette. (Films with smells would work a lot better if
audiences were rabbits, which depend upon smell to avoid predators and
possess nostrils equipped with skin flaps, which restrict the volume of
molecules they can take in with a sniff.)
Enter Hans Laube with what seemed like a solution. A tall, grayhaired
Swiss native who affected owlishly severe dark eyeglasses, Laube’s
background is a bit mysterious—media coverage of his work identifi es
him variously as a professor, an advertising executive, an electrical engineer,
and “an expert in osmology, the science of odors.” By one account,
sometime prior to World War II, he invented a method for cleaning the air
in large auditoriums, which became widely used throughout Europe. That
success somehow led him to his fascination with reversing the process,
and putting odors of his choosing back into rooms. He developed an artifi
cial scent-delivery process, in which chemicals were transmitted through
a network of pipes connected to individual seats in the theater, so that the
timing and amount of aroma could be more carefully regulated. With a
colleague, Robert Barth, Laube produced a thirty- fi ve- minute “smello-drama”
movie, Mein Traum—in En glish, My Dream—for the 1940
world’s fair in New York. The projectionist operated a control board with
dials that allowed him to release thirty-two different odors, including
roses, coconut, tar, hay, and peaches.
Laube’s invention, “which of course is a secret pending patents, is
said to have produced odors as quickly and easily as the soundtrack of a
film produces sound,” a newspaper reported in 1943. “The scientists