Madeleine – The Unique Smell Capturing Camera

Madeleine A Unique Camera That Captures Smell

Madeleine is an awesome and unique scent capturing camera that stores smells in little perfume bottles. Amy Radcliffe invented a camera which records scents instead of images. The project was developed as part of her masters degree. Find out more about this awesome invention, right here.

It is a well known fact that the sense of smell has powerful connections with our emotional memory. How many times have you walked into a room, felt a familiar smell that took you back to a special place and time? Well, Amy Radcliffe decided it is time to create something unique, which will capture smells, similar to taking a photo. Thus, Madeleine was created, a device which captures smell.

Our odor memories are quite unstable. Once we smell something too often, our brains will erase the smell from our memory. Madeleine is basically a over-sized electronic nose which:

processes the particles and produces a graph-like formula that makes up the smell. From this formula, you can artificially recreate the precise odor.

Once you’ve captured your desired smell, all you have to do is take it to be developed in a special lab, which will be endowed with a gas chromatography–mass spectrometry machine, and tiny bottles for your smelly memories. Once you’ve got that, your memories are good to go. All you will have to do is pop it open, and remember the good days. When you run out of the smell, all you have to do is order a fresh new batch.

How long does it take to take a picture of a smell?
Amy Radcliffe declared that the exposure time may vary, it takes only a few minutes to capture the scent of a fruit, where as capturing the smell of a person’s skin can take several hours, or even a day, depending on the strength and subtlety of the smell being captured.

How does Madeline, the smell camera work?
A pump extracts the smell from the source. The smell is then taken through tubes to the main unit where a resin trap absorbs the particles. The rest is history.

The creator of this unbelievable machine is now negotiating with fragrance labs, in hopes that her genius idea will be taken to a bigger level. Till then, all we can do is start making our list of smells we want to capture.

Below you can see more pictures of Madeleine the unique smell capturing camera