This section is from the book "Facts Worth Knowing", by Robert Kemp Philip. Also available from Amazon: Inquire Within for Anything You Want to Know.
Numerous experiments with roasted coffee prove that it is the most powerful means, not only of rendering animal and vegetable effluvia innocuous, but of absolutely destroying them. A room in which meat in an advanced degree of decomposition had been kept for some time, was instantly deprived of all smell on an open coffee-roaster being carried through it, containing a pound of coffee newly roasted. In another room, exposed to the effluvium occasioned by the clearing out of the dung-pit, so that sulphuretted hydrogen and ammonia in great quantities could be chemically detected, the stench was completely removed in half a minute, on the employment of three ounces of fresh roasted coffee, whilst the other parts of the house were permanently cleared of the same smell by being simply traversed with the coffee-roaster, although the cleansing of the dung-pit continued for several hours after. The best mode of using the coffee as a disinfectant is to dry the raw bean, pound it in a mortar, and then roast the powder on a moderately heated iron plate, until it assumes a dark brown tint, when it is fit for use. Then sprinkle it in sinks or cess-pools, or lay it on a plate in the room which you wish to have purified. Coffee acid or coffee oil acts more readily in minute quantities.
 
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