Smelling salts have a surprisingly long history — With references found in writing from the Roman Empire in 77 C.E. Here's a quick tour from their early days to the gym bag.
Ancient roots
The active ingredient in smelling salts is ammonium carbonate, an ammonia compound. The Roman scholar Pliny the Elder documented a compound known as Hammoniacus sal (later called sal ammoniac) in his first-century encyclopedic work. Additional references to preparations like it go back to at least the 13th century, when alchemists were already experimenting with ammonia. In other words, people have been making versions of smelling salts for two millennium. You can also find references to smelling salts in classic works of literature such as works by Charles Dickens, where back then a popular solution named "sal volatile" was used to treat fainting, hysteria and freight in his characters.
A household staple
For much of their history, smelling salts were a common household item, kept on hand as a revival aid. Romans presumably used them in the coliseum when onlookers would faint from the gory battles. They show up throughout historical accounts and literature as something people reached for in a pinch — a small, familiar object in the medicine cabinet of earlier eras.
The move into sport
It's only relatively recently that smelling salts became strongly associated with athletics, but once athletes discovered them, they became an instant staple. Over the past few decades they've become a common sight in strength sports, hockey, football, and combat sports — passed around benches and platforms as part of pre-effort routines. Smelling salts are most commonly found in high-intensity sports that require shorts bursts of effort. Heavy gym lifts being the most common example.
From ampule to bottle
The format has evolved too. For years the standard was the single-use crushable ampule. More recently, resealable bottle-style salts took over for regular users — sharper, more economical, and longer-lasting. Ward builds on that with bottles made specifically for athletes, including the first formulated for cold conditions hockey smelling salt and the refillable Stainless Steel Asylum Bottle.
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