By the end of the war in 1944, post war recovery started: Alain Bertons work on the application of absorption and emission spectroscopy in the ultraviolet and infrared, and within the frame of concerns about labor force protection, the specific dosage of atmospheric pollutants became of vital interest in factories to effectively detect and remedy industrial pollution. Thus, in the 1950s, based on the method of gas chromatography analysis by low temperature followed by pyrolysis, he managed to isolate chlorinated substances and acid vapors components in the air. He was able to individualize traces of gas and vapors by using ultra-sensitive galvanic batteries and galvanic microcell detectors. He presented his research in the preamble to the convention of the Analytical Chemistry Group in 1958. Alain Berton named his invention "the Osmopile," later nicknamed "the sniffing cells" by the scientific journal Atomes'. The first "artificial nose" was thus born. His invention was adopted and developed in the US and went around the world with a report from the Associated Press dated December 8, 1958.
Berton’s Osmopile was marketed by Jouan, a laboratory equipment manufacturer founded in the 1940s by a researcher from the Pasteur Institute and acquired in 2003 by Thermo Electron. The Osmopile device was modernized over time and used in the fight against industrial pollution.
Through his invention, Alain Berton proved to be an ecology pioneer.