Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre is a fictional character created in 1978 by Kenneth Woolner of the University of Waterloo to justify the use of a capital L to denote litres.
The International System of Units usually only permits the use of a capital letter when a unit is named after a person. [1] The lower-case character l might be difficult to distinguish from the upper-case character I or the digit 1 in certain fonts and styles, and therefore both the lower-case (l) and the upper-case (L) are allowed as the symbol for litre. The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology now recommends the use of the uppercase letter L, [2] a practice that is also widely followed in Canada and Australia.[ citation needed]
Woolner perpetrated the April Fools' Day hoax in the April 1978 issue of "CHEM 13 News", a newsletter concerned with chemistry for school teachers. According to the hoax, Claude Litre was born on 12 February 1716, the son of a manufacturer of wine bottles. During Litre's extremely distinguished fictional scientific career, he purportedly proposed a unit of volume measurement that was incorporated into the International System of Units after his death in 1778. [3] [4]
The hoax was mistakenly printed as fact in the IUPAC journal Chemistry International and subsequently retracted. [3] [5]
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Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre is a fictional character created in 1978 by Kenneth Woolner of the University of Waterloo to justify the use of a capital L to denote litres.
The International System of Units usually only permits the use of a capital letter when a unit is named after a person. [1] The lower-case character l might be difficult to distinguish from the upper-case character I or the digit 1 in certain fonts and styles, and therefore both the lower-case (l) and the upper-case (L) are allowed as the symbol for litre. The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology now recommends the use of the uppercase letter L, [2] a practice that is also widely followed in Canada and Australia.[ citation needed]
Woolner perpetrated the April Fools' Day hoax in the April 1978 issue of "CHEM 13 News", a newsletter concerned with chemistry for school teachers. According to the hoax, Claude Litre was born on 12 February 1716, the son of a manufacturer of wine bottles. During Litre's extremely distinguished fictional scientific career, he purportedly proposed a unit of volume measurement that was incorporated into the International System of Units after his death in 1778. [3] [4]
The hoax was mistakenly printed as fact in the IUPAC journal Chemistry International and subsequently retracted. [3] [5]
{{
cite book}}
: |work=
ignored (
help)