Benjamin Franklin... fancied flatus. So much, actually, that in 1781 he penned an essay dedicated to the thunder down under.

Franklin lived in Paris at the time, serving as US Ambassador to France. There, he heard that the Royal Academy at Brussels was requesting scientific essays and would award prizes for the best papers. The news annoyed Franklin. He thought scientists were falling out of touch with reality. Year after year, they churned out pompous papers that didn’t make life better for the common man. Science should be practical, Franklin thought. Science should help everyday problems. Science should, you know, make farts smell good.

So Franklin wrote a mock letter, "To the Royal Academy...”

...Franklin wasn’t the only believer in the art of the fart. Sixty years earlier, Jonathan Swift—a master of satire and author of Gulliver’s Travels—wrote an essay titled “The Benefit of Farting Explain’d,” published in a pamphlet in 1722.

The paper’s title page is peppered with puns. Swift hides under the pseudonym “Don Fartinhando Puff-Indorst, Professor of Bumbast at the University of Craccow.” The essay is “translated into English at the Request and for the Use of the Lady Damp-Fart, of Her-fart-shire” by “Obadiah Fizle, Groom of the Stool to the Princess of Arse-Mini in Sardinia.” Oh, and it was also reviewed by a “College of Fizz-icians.”