A chemist invented a fake Frenchman to justify capital L for liters
In 1978 Kenneth Woolner of the University of Waterloo solved that by inventing the person: Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre, born in 1716 to a maker of wine bottles, who over a long and distinguished career proposed a unit of volume that entered the metric system after his death in 1778. IUPAC's journal Chemistry International later printed Litre as a real historical figure and had to retract him. The liter is really named after the litron, an old French dry measure.
- ▪In 1978 Kenneth Woolner of the University of Waterloo solved that by inventing the person: Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre, born in 1716 to a maker of wine bottles, who over a long and distinguished career proposed a unit of volume that en
- ▪IUPAC's journal Chemistry International later printed Litre as a real historical figure and had to retract him.
- ▪The liter is really named after the litron, an old French dry measure.
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A chemist invented a fake Frenchman to justify capital L for liters Ellsworth Toohey 7:00 am Fri Jul 24, 2026 Claude Litre — EN NOIR & BLANC / CC0 (Wikimedia Commons) The International System of Units capitalizes a unit's symbol only when the unit is named for a person, which leaves the liter with a lowercase l that is easy to mistake for a capital I or the numeral 1. In 1978 Kenneth Woolner of the University of Waterloo solved that by inventing the person: Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre, born in 1716 to a maker of wine bottles, who over a long and distinguished career proposed a unit of volume that entered the metric system after his death in 1778. Woolner ran the biography as an April Fools' joke in the April 1978 CHEM 13 News, a newsletter written for school chemistry teachers.
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