[3][8][2] Unlike its oxygen analogue acetone, which does not polymerise easily, thioacetone spontaneously polymerizes even at very low temperatures, pure or dissolved in ether or ethylene oxide, yielding a white solid that is a varying mixture of a linear polymer ···–[C(CH3)2–S–]n–··· and the cyclic trimer trithioacetone.

[5] In 1889, an attempt to distill the chemical in the German city of Freiburg was followed by cases of vomiting, nausea, and unconsciousness in an area with a radius of 0.75 kilometres (0.47 mi) around the laboratory due to the smell.

During early experiments, a stopper jumped from a bottle of residues, and, although replaced at once, resulted in an immediate complaint of nausea and sickness from colleagues working in a building two hundred yards [180 m] away.

Two of our chemists who had done no more than investigate the cracking of minute amounts of trithioacetone found themselves the object of hostile stares in a restaurant and suffered the humiliation of having a waitress spray the area around them with a deodorant.

To convince them otherwise, they were dispersed with other observers around the laboratory, at distances up to a quarter of a mile [0.40 km], and one drop of either acetone gem-dithiol or the mother liquors from crude trithioacetone crystallisations were placed on a watch glass in a fume cupboard.