by Bill Retskin

Something caught my eye a few months ago that brought back several childhood memories. As a child, I frequently watched my mother light a blue tip Ohio and let it flame into the air. She never lit anything with it, she let it burn for a moment and then blew it out.

Do you remember those television commercials of the mid-1970s that showed a woman entering a neighbor's house and immediately wrinkling up her nose and sniffing the air. "House-a-tosis," said the deep voiced background announcer...and House-a-tosis it was. The advertised products rid your house of unpleasant odors, performed magic from an aerosol can, and came in a variety of pleasant outdoor fragrances.

Long before aerosol deodorants were marketed down our television throats, there was the simple kitchen match. For years, housewives proclaimed that the surest way to overcome unpleasant household odors was to burn several kitchen matches in the room, blowing them out and allowing the smoke to defuse into the air. Homemakers "just knew" that the burning chemicals from the common kitchen match made a good deodorant.

This inexpensive remedy remained the province of undocumented kitchen magic for many years. Finally, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, scientists at the Illinois Institute of Technology, Armour Research Foundation Laboratories decided to take a scientific look at this phenomenon. They performed their work on behalf of The Diamond Match Company.

After exhaustive study, the chemists made their findings public. The American homemaker was right. Common kitchen matches really did mask unpleasant smells, ranging from sickening sweet through repugnantly gagging to unspeakably awful.

Dr. William L. Kubie, an Armour research biochemist who worked on the project for Diamond Match, used an impartial group of eight men and two women. This unbiased jury was employed as "sniffers." First, they were asked to smell the unadulterated odor. Then, the odor after it was affected by the burning kitchen matches.

Kubie pulled out all the stops. During one of his experiments, he used a commonly known bad odor compound called tertiary-butyl mercaptan or "skunk odor." When left in a room overnight, even a closed bottle of this extremely noxious chemical could permeate every nook and cranny of the room and adjacent hallways in a small house. Kubie lit just six kitchen matches, and the jury reported that odor was dramatically masked for more than five minutes.

Kubie pointed out that there are four mechanisms by which the sense of smell can be prevented from detecting any odor. They are masking, anesthesia, neutralization, and fatigue.

Masking wipes out one odor by superimposing another odor. Anesthesia is the total blocking of our sense of smell toward any odor. Neutralization combines two odors that may result in a sense of less odor stimulation than from either odor alone. Fatigue is the fading of the intensity with which the odor can be detected, although the strength of the odor might remain the same. It is the masking effect that made the common kitchen "strike-anywhere" matches so popular as a deodorant.

I am sure that Dr. Kubie used only Diamond matches, as he conducted the study for Diamond Match. Tests by this author, although performed with more common household odors than "skunk odor," have indicated that kitchen matches from other match companies (The Ohio Match Co. and the Eddy Match Co. of Canada) work equally as well.

If you wish to try this at home, be sure to use full size kitchen matches. Although book and box matches work with some odors, the amount of deodorant effect is greater with the common kitchen match.