Great Inventions of Our Time - The Smell Detector

Somewhere in this cellar there is cat shit.  I can smell it - boy, can I smell it.  But I cannot find it.  It's lurking and laughing at me.

Smoke detectors can detect one part of smoke in several million parts of air.  It can't be too hard to frig a smoke detector into a handheld device that could be used to :

• Find cat poo in a place where it should not be.
• Find where visiting tomcats have pissed in your house.  We've all spent time on all fours sniffing the floor, haven't we?  And after that, we have to find where the tomcat pissed and clean it up.

Perhaps the most useful application could be as a 'Who Farted?  detector. The fat bloke and the dog would no longer take the blame for every surreptitious boff let out be another.  We'd never have to pretend we'd not smelt it in case we get accused.  A simple sweep with the Who Farted?TM and everyone would know who'd trodden on the carpet frog. I suspect that putting this on the market would worry a few people I know who claim to have never ever farted.

But why stop there?  Why not make the thing trainable so that it can learn and then detect smells. I accept that for many people, a trainable personal smell detector is another word for a dog.  A smell detector that doesn't noisily lick it's own bollocks has to be an advantage though.  Especially if you're holding it in your hand.

Armed with an adjustable smell detector, you'd never lose anything again.  Train it to recognise the smell of your wallet and it'll find your wallet. The only downside is that the technology isn't quite there yet.  To ensure that the thing works, you have to keep your loseable items steeped in your personal smell.  As this simply means you have to stick your iphone up your arse, I see no problem at all.

Of course, this isn't true.  But it might come true.  It's a little known fact that those 'fat measuring' scales that send electrical pulses through your feet to measure the percentage of body fat, were invented in the 1890s.  But at that time the technology was so primitive that the user had to place one buttock on each plate and pull the buttocks far apart to avoid a spark arcing across the luxury gap and setting hairs alight.  It didn't sell in huge numbers.