It's World Ozone Day — 'Ozone' Was Never the Name of a Layer. It Was the Name of a Smell — Woody Magazine, Sept. 16, 2026
Woody Magazine
We write the things that aren't news
Sept. 16, 2026 (Wed.)
It's World Ozone Day — 'Ozone' Was Never the Name of a Layer. It Was the Name of a Smell
Nobody could bottle the stuff, so a chemist named it by nose. The name arrived 25 years before anyone knew what it belonged to.
- "Ozone" is Greek for "to give off a smell." A Basel chemist attached it in 1840 to the odor that filled his lab whenever electricity ran through water.
- Ozone falls apart too fast to be captured, so for 25 years the smell was all anyone had. The formula, three oxygen atoms, came in 1865.
- This is not a story about ozone disappearing. It is about one molecule we protect 15 miles up and issue warnings against at street level.
Stand next to a busy photocopier long enough and a sharp, prickly smell reaches the back of your nose. The air after a close lightning strike carries the same note. That smell has a name: ozone. Today is the United Nations' World Ozone Day. On Sept. 16, 1987, delegates in Montreal signed the protocol that phased out the chemicals eating the ozone layer, and the UN later fixed the date as an observance. So most of us know ozone as something that lives high in the sky. Fair enough. In the news, the word almost never appears without "layer" attached.
But on the day the word was born, there was no sky in the picture. There was a laboratory, and there was a nose.
Haarlem, 1785: a smell beside an electric machine
The first person to write the smell down was Martinus van Marum, a physician in the Dutch city of Haarlem. In 1785 he was running a giant static-electricity generator, newly built for a museum, and noticed that the air around it took on a peculiar odor. He decided the electricity itself was producing it. For the next half century people called it "the smell of electricity" and left it at that. The smell had a description but no owner, and it stayed that way for 55 years.
Basel, March 13, 1839: a one-sentence report
Christian Friedrich Schönbein taught chemistry at the University of Basel. On March 13, 1839, he told the city's natural-science society something brief. When he ran a current through water, a smell rose from the positive electrode, and it was strikingly like the smell of an electric machine. He already knew that smell from outside the lab. Lightning had once struck a church near his home, and the odor hung in the air long after the storm had passed. Now the same thing was in his apparatus.
The next year, 1840, Schönbein wrote to the French Academy of Sciences in Paris. The smell, he argued, came from electricity only in the sense that electricity made it. What made the smell was a substance, and a new one. He proposed a name: ozone, from the Greek ozein, to give off a smell. He did not choose it himself. A colleague, W. Vischer, who taught Greek at Basel, suggested it.
Think of a neighbor upstairs whom you have never seen but whose voice you know through the ceiling. You need to write something on the mailbox, and you have no name, so you write the only thing you have. The voice.
Why a smell, of all things
Because nothing else was available. Ozone is three oxygen atoms bonded into a molecule that would rather be two, and it decays back into ordinary oxygen quickly. It attacks almost anything it touches, including rubber tubing and most metals; glass, gold and platinum survive. That ruled out the standard move of trapping a gas in a bottle and weighing it. Schönbein and the chemists after him spent decades trying to isolate pure ozone and failed. What they could hold on to was the smell.
That is how Mordecai Rubin, a chemist at the Technion, put it in a 2001 history of the period. Schönbein later devised a test strip: paper coated with starch and potassium iodide, which browned in the presence of ozone. A Basel bookbinder sold it as a kit for a little over one florin. Even then he trusted his nose above the paper.
Skepticism was inevitable, and it was reasonable. In 1849 a medical journal introduced ozone as "an imaginary principle" that Professor Schönbein "supposes" to exist in the atmosphere. There was a smell, the journal allowed, but nobody could say what was making it. Schönbein himself believed until 1850 that ozone was a compound of hydrogen and oxygen. In 1845, Jean Charles Marignac in Geneva showed that pure oxygen alone, sparked, produced ozone. In 1865, Jacques-Louis Soret, also in Geneva, let ozone soak into oil of turpentine and oil of cinnamon, measured what was lost, and arrived at three oxygen atoms: O₃. Schönbein died three years later.
The smell that misled a century: ozone at the seaside
Because the name was a smell, people found ozone wherever they found a smell. Nineteenth-century Britain found it at the beach. Sea air had a bracing tang, and Victorians decided it was ozone and that ozone was good for you. Children were told to breathe deeply and take in the ozone. If you grew up anywhere near a coast, you probably heard some version of it yourself.
Both halves were wrong. In 2007 a team led by Andrew Johnston at the University of East Anglia traced the smell to microbes in the mud of a Norfolk salt marsh. Bacteria there break down a compound made by marine plankton and release dimethyl sulfide, a gas with a sulfurous edge. Not ozone, and not necessarily good for you either. Schönbein himself had reported as early as 1851 that ozone irritated the airways, and he had watched a rabbit die within an hour in ozone-laden air. The name traveled faster than its discoverer's warning.
Same name, two altitudes
In the twentieth century the name changed owners twice. First it went up. Scientists learned that ozone collects in the stratosphere, roughly 10 to 20 miles above the ground, and that this thin band absorbs most of the sun's ultraviolet radiation. When measurements in 1985 showed the ozone above Antarctica thinning sharply each spring, governments took two years to reach the Montreal Protocol. The Antarctic hole still opens every southern spring. NASA and NOAA treat Sept. 7 through Oct. 13 as the peak of the season; last year the hole averaged 18.71 million square kilometers over that window, about twice the area of the contiguous United States, and peaked on Sept. 9 at 22.86 million. As you read this, the hole is close to its widest for the year.
Then the name came back down. Exhaust from cars and sunlight react to make ozone at street level, and this ozone is a pollutant, not a shield. South Korea, where this magazine is edited, runs an ozone alert system from May through September and issues a warning when the hourly average passes 0.12 parts per million. The warning means stop exercising outside. In the Seoul metropolitan area the alerts went out 87 times in 2017 and 122 times in 2025, spread over 32 days. They arrive as text messages, not sirens.
The name was born 25 years before the molecule was understood. People wrote a voice on the mailbox, and when they finally saw the face, they left the mailbox alone. We guard that neighbor on the upper floor and avoid him on the ground floor. The name has not moved. We have.
Sources
- Source ↗ Mordecai B. Rubin, "The History of Ozone. The Schönbein Period, 1839–1868," Bulletin for the History of Chemistry 26(1), 2001
- Source ↗ "Ozone," medical journal, July 1849 (U.S. National Library of Medicine, PMC archive)
- Source ↗ Online Etymology Dictionary, "ozone"
- Source ↗ Odeuropa Encyclopedia of Smell History and Heritage, "Ozone"
- Source ↗ NASA Goddard, "History of the study of atmospheric ozone"
- Source ↗ University of East Anglia, "Cloning the smell of the seaside," EurekAlert, 2007
- Source ↗ United Nations, International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer
- Source ↗ NOAA and NASA, "2025 ozone hole is 5th smallest since 1992," 2025
- Source ↗ Metropolitan Air Quality Management Office, Korean Ministry of Climate, Energy and Environment, ozone alert statistics (in Korean)
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