(upbeat music)
- The smell of money, scratch, moola,
Aunt Bertha's paper hand grenades.
Okay, I made that last one up.
Anyhow, hey there gang, it's Jonathan.
Do you have a dollar handy?
I'd like you take a sniff.
Now, don't actually touch
your nose to it though,
you'll see why in a second.
Now, in 2013, the Federal
Mint produced 1,792,000,000
of these little guys,
and each has a distinctive smell.
But why, where does that
smell of money come from?
Well first, let's look at the components
of a typical greenback.
You'll hear people call this paper money,
but that's a little misleading.
US currency is primarily
made of cotton, linen,
and different types of ink.
Cotton and linen have light scents,
so experts like Columbia's
Stuart Firestein
believe the ink itself is responsible
for that new money smell.
There's some pretty good
evidence for this too.
Argentina has trained dogs to sniff out
this ink smell and catch smugglers.
When Joseph Stetter and his
colleagues at KWJ Engineering
began building the first
money sniffing machine,
they used gas chromatography
and mass spectrometry
to hunt for the smell of cash.
What did they find?
Apparently, that unique
fragrance is produced
from a set of trace chemicals
including aldehydes,
furans, and organic acids.
These were found in tiny amounts,
and Stetter believes
that the precise source
of the new money smell
may never be published
in a scientific journal due to concerns
about security and counterfeiters.
But what about bucks that aren't new?
Remember when I told you not to put
your nose on the lettuce?
Well, that's because money
is, on average, filthy.
See, the fibers making up each dollar bill
are surprisingly absorbent,
which can make it pretty dirty.
A solid majority of US cash
is tainted with cocaine,
fecal matter, bacteria, sweat,
snot, and more.
But of all the scents money
can pick up in its journey
from one dirty hand to another,
nothing quite matches the fragrance
of freshly printed new dollars.
Some companies have even experimented
with piping an artificially
created new money odor
into air ducts to motivate workers,
and coins can have a
smell of their own too,
but that's a story for a different day.
Thanks for watching.
What do you think, could
the mere smell of money
change a person's behavior?
What do the crazy
contaminants on US dollars
tell us about the country's
hand washing habits?
Let me know in the comments,
and if you like this video,
go ahead and make it official,
subscribe for more brain stuff every week.
Okay, smackers, scrilla, two-bits,
shekles, cheddar, bones,
breads, benjamins,
dead presidents, wampums, clams.
