I heard in school from my teacher that no one knows what hydrogen cyanide tastes like, it’s so poisonous. She said one scientist, being already on deathbed, proceeded to taste it, pen and paper in hand. But once he tasted the stuff, he died before he could write more than “S”. Sweet? Salty? Sour?
Myth? Or is this true?
It may be true, although the story about the dying scientist sounds a bit dodgy. HCN is a gas, so one would ‘taste’ it by inhaling it. It is virulently toxic, so this would result in almost certain death. It is possible that people who have recovered from cyanide poisoning (say they were exposed to a low dose, or accidentally ingested a very dilute solution of HCN (hydrocyanic acid) could talk about its taste.
It does have a very distinct smell - of almonds.
I read somewhere that to 40% of the population, it smells like almonds (more precisely, almonds smell of cyanide, since like all rose family fruit–including apples–there is cyanide in the seed). The other 60% smell nothing.
While it is extremely deadly, it is no more so than hydrogen sulfide. The difference is that we are exquisitely sensitive to HS, but only barely to HCN. Presumably, we never experienced the latter much during our evolution, but the smell of HS was an immediate signal to be elsewhere. When in took qualitative analysis in college in 1955, our analysis was based on using fancy reagents in tiny quantitites. Until the previous year, the methods were based on precipitating most of the metals as sulfides using HS. The previous year a student died. Apparently your smell apparatus can get paralyzed by habituation and the student has spent too much time in the sulfide room/
I can agree with Hari on the almonds scent. They teach us in the military that if we smell burning almonds to RUN the other direction…unfortunately my sense of smell isn’t very directional so lets hope I never encounter this scenario.
Obviously, he needed to take a page out of the books of tween girls everywhere:
Did U taste it? Was it:
o Sweet
o Salty
o Sour
o Somethin else?
(chk 1 & give ths bk 2 me in math if ur not ded. kthx.)
It’s very directional. Smell comes from where the wind is blowing from. The best bet would be to move perpendicular to the direction of the wind. (If wind is from north, run east or west. Do not run north or south.)
Hopefully you’ll never actually ***NEED * ** to know this. 
I prefer the minty freshness of hemlock personally, but I am an old-fashioned sort…
Here’s Cecil on the subject: How do they know what lethal gases smell like?
R U Dead? Check
__ Yes or ___ No
In Agathat Christie detective novels, the hero was always announcing the presence of cyanide by ‘the smell of almonds’.
(If I was in one of her books, i would feed my victim almonds before using arsenic :eek: )
My Plant ID teacher was always scraping at tree stems with a fingernail and saying things like, “Smell the almond scent? This here’s a wild cherry!” And I smelt…nothing. I found that nodding enthusiastically earned me an A, but I to this day I still couldn’t identify wild cherry to save my life.
IT SMELLS OF…DEATH.
x Maybe
R U Dead? Check
X Yes or X No
luv
S’s cat
That should be
R U Dead? Check
/ Yes or __ No
luv
S’s cat
“See you in Hell, you poisoning bastards”
Hey, the OP doesn’t say the scientist agreed to the experiment.
HCN can’t be *that *poisonous because I’ve smelled it on many occasions, principally when using a reagent called sodium cyanoborohydride. Small amounts of HCN are produced during its destruction; it doesn’t really smell like almonds to me, but does have a distinctive (not at all unpleasant) smell. You don’t drop dead as soon as you smell it, although I couldn’t possibly quantify the amounts involved.
Can you prove you’re not a zombie?
Cyanide poisoning is not always fatal (there is an antidote), and takes up to 30 minutes. I is in MHO not a nice way to go, painful and slow. There would be plenty of time to write a page or two on how it tastes.
As far as I can see, in low doses it has a slighlty almond taste (probably due to the smell). In higher doses it can burn your mouth as it is rather acidic.
So all those detective novel scenarios where someone drinks something with cyanide in it and instantly keels over foaming at the mouth aren’t accurate?