It is an interesting phenomenon when you can smell solid iron or copper just by touching it.

I guess direct contact is as close as you can get to the metal.

But most of the time I'd rather not touch it.

Interestingly, with the molten stuff I get the same smell the closer I come to it, within a number of feet rather than inches or direct contact.

And I know there's plenty of the element in its gaseous state vaporizing from the melt so it makes perfect sense.

No organic compounds necessary. Or could be they are already in or near your nose to begin with.

Once a molecule of metal like this does evaporate into the atmosphere it is extremely unlikely to ever become solid unoxidized metal again.

Most naked metal atoms are easily oxidized by air to their positively-charged ionic form, which in its gaseous state highly diluted by the same air can still exist as a gas for quite some time and distance before settling out due to its relatively heavier molecular weight compared to air.

Unless the concentration of gaseous metal is above a certain amount, there will be no conventional precipitation of the solid metal oxide from the air, instead each molecule of oxide will remain in its gaseous form as long as possible until it settles individually without ever combining or crystallizing with any of its own kind.

No need for the gaseous metal to remain above its actual boiling point according to its characteristic phase behavior. Once the metal's not in its pure form the phase behavior diagram for that element does not apply any more.

>Immediately after skin-metal contact, the SPME fiber collected volatile compounds for 5 minutes. The SPME samples were analyzed by GC/MS (Agilent GC column DB-5, 30 m x 250 μm x 0.3 μm, GC 6890, MS 5973, 115in EI mode, Environmental Chemstation G1701CA)

We've got one of these instruments, they are great for detecting and identifying volatile organic compounds, and it looks like theirs was expertly operated in a research way.

On the GC/MS the Gas Chromatograph separates the sample mixture into its individual components (according to controlled volatility), which are then detected by the Mass Spectrometer as each component gradually emerges from the chromatograph, traditionally forming a series of peaks on a chart. The spectrometer works to reveal the chemical identity of each peak, relying on a vast library of known references.

In addition their parallel olfactory work puts an outstanding dimension on GC data not usually seen in many labs.
This is where you run a tube directly from the exit of the chromatograph up to your nose to smell each peak as it emerges. The spectrometer can only tell you so much. Lots of instruments basically amplify the senses, but the senses can still be pretty good on their own.

This was developed not just for fragrance research, interestingly there are some volatile chemicals that can be more reliably detected in super-small concentrations by nose than by established electronics.

The SPME is Solid-Phase Micro-Extraction, a technique where sample components found in very low trace quantities are concentrated for better detection above the same instrument baseline, compared to direct chromatography of the plain sample.

It really does combine to show excellent progress on skin-borne compounds' volatile organic reaction products.

I would want to further experiment by taking a similar approach using the ICP/MS to detect the exact metal concentration in the same air samples as were being exposed to SPME.

The ICP/MS units are built to measure trace metals, the GC/MS for trace volatile organics.

They even have GC/ICP/MS which they used for the phosphorus- and arsenic-based volatile compounds, I would like to see if there was any detection of iron itself, which if it made it through the chromatograph to the ICP/MS it would be an organic form.

In the machine shop I figure gaseous metal is being generated through friction even under coolant without any actual melting.

No matter how small the proportion of individual metal molecules that make it into the atmosphere without being a member of an actual particle, once they are there they are not coming down right away and it will be relative to their distance from the source.

There is also the possibility that free metal molecules or ions rapidly form interesting organometallic complexes with some organic materials on the hands, and complexes like that can have orders-of-magnitude more vapor pressure compared to the raw metal. Even though the complex has the metal carrying around a small carbon attachment adding to its molecular weight, there are forces that could cause a molecule of the complex to travel through the air further than the plain metal or oxide would once emitted from the source.