engineering challenge? the smellophone

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so we've had the telephone for a long time, where sounds are "transmitted"; more recently, computers and the internet have given us video phone, where additionally patterns of light are "transmitted". so how would we design a smellophone, where olfactory matter is "transmitted"?

the reason why i quote "transmitted" is because it isn't the actual sound or light that is transmitted. rather, the sound or light is translated into electrical signals - which are transmitted - and at the other end, the signals are translated back into sound or light.

similarly, with this hypothetical smellophone, it wouldn't be the actual molecules that get physicaly transferred to the other end. rather, the chemical composition would have to be translated into electrical signals, and at the other end, the signals would be translated back into the chemical composition for the recipient to smell.

now i'm sure it wouldn't be any problem to encode the chemical composition into electrical signals, nor to decode the electrical signals into the correct chemical composition. this is well within the bounds of what we can efficiently do with computer technology.

where i'm seeing the problem is: firstly and minorly, in determining the chemical composition of an arbitrary smell being sent; and secondly and majorly, producing the actual chemicals as specified in the received chemical composition data.

what kind of physical technology do we need to look at, to make the smellophone a reality?

The reciever would have to be the size of a small room-something the pharmacy of your local drugstore- so it could be stocked with chemicals ( or you could think of it like your computer's printer -but instead of two ink cartridges -it would have hundreds or thousands of chemical cartridges).

On the transmitting end of the line is a mechanical "nose" that picks up the smell. It translates the smell into digital, or analog, electric signals, and sends them to the reciever. The reciever gets the information and procredes to mix up a chemical mix from its inventory of chemicals to match the recieved data (kinda the way your printer knows how to mix colors from the color cartridge to print pics you download) and then exposes the new aromatic concoction to the air - and viola- you have a transmited smell!

Why you would want to do it- or how much it would cost- I dont know.

I think that anything where you can smell something that someone else points you at poses a very serious ethical dilemma.

But hey, what do I know? Maybe people want to smell each other's armpits over the phone. Or the inside of each other's toilets. Whatever! There's no risk in that at all. That said: I will never use one and if you give me one I'll throw it at your face in disgust.