Imagine, you are a woman living in the 1800s. You have to wear a corset and sometimes it feels so tight that it seems like you can't breathe. These are the terrible times, times when the world becomes blurry and you feel like you are falling. Sometimes, if you are lucky, you can feel that an attack is coming on and quietly take a sniff from your bottle of salts, but occasionally, it is too late and someone else needs to administer them. How embarassing!
The kids were very confused by the idea of smelling salts when I showed the bottle to them. To the children, the idea of simply 'smelling salt' to wake someone up was simply ludicrous. One child explained 'I could understand if they put salt on someones tongue or rubbed it in a cut or something but smelling - salt has no smell!'. They were even more confused to discover that often 'smelling salts' had nothing to do with salt at all, but were instead crushed glass or some type of crystal, covered with ammonia. The children thought 'the whole thing is just stupid'. Despite the childrens reactions to smelling salt, smelling salts do actually work to 'wake people up' or even return someone who has fainted to consciousness. However, they are not necessarily safe - in fact there is a lot of debate about whether they are safe or not. These ones, despite their age, are still quite effective, as I discovered when I took the lid off the bottle!
Smelling salts appear to have a very long history, dating right back to Roman times. They weren't always known as smelling salts though. According to Pliny the Romans used something called hammonicus sal and, although we can't be certain, it is likely that this was like sal hammonicus, a smelling salt preparation used in the 1200s. They are also sometimes known as sal volatile, because of peoples reactions to them or spirit/salt of hartshorn because the horns of a certain type of deer, known as a hart, were used in their preparation.
It was during Victorian times that smelling salts probably reached the height of their use, when they were particularly famous for their ability to revive fainting women. Women of this time were known for 'the vapours', frequent fits of fainting, partly caused by their incredibly tightly laced corsets. You often read about these episodes in Victorian era novels. The problem of fainting women became so bad that some policemen carried special containers of smelling salts, about the size and shape of a whistle, to use on women who fainted. You can see an example of one of these containers if you click here. The ingredient in smelling salts which produces the reaction is usually ammonia, and often ammonium carbonate is actually what the crystals are made of. In Victorian times though, at the height of their popularity, apparently other crystals (incuding common salt crystals) and even glass were sometimes used. These were covered with ammonia and sometimes even dyed (as the orange ones I showed the children probably were) to make them look more attractive.
