A helen is a humorous unit of measurement based on the concept that

Helen of Troy Helen of Troy, Helen, Helena, (Ancient Greek: Ἑλένη ''Helénē'', ) also known as beautiful Helen, Helen of Argos, or Helen of Sparta, was a figure in Greek mythology said to have been the most beautiful woman in the world. She was believe ...

, from the ''

Iliad The ''Iliad'' (; grc, Ἰλιάς, Iliás, ; "a poem about Ilium") is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. As with the ''Odysse ...

'', had a "face that launched a thousand ships". The helen is thus used to measure quantities of

beauty Beauty is commonly described as a feature of objects that makes these objects pleasurable to perceive. Such objects include landscapes, sunsets, humans and works of art. Beauty, together with art and taste, is the main subject of aesthetics, o ...

in terms of the theoretical action that could be accomplished by the wielder of such beauty.

Origin

The classic reference to Helen's beauty is

Marlowe Marlowe may refer to: Name * Christopher Marlowe (1564–1593), English dramatist, poet and translator * Philip Marlowe, fictional hardboiled detective created by author Raymond Chandler * Marlowe (name), including list of people and characters w ...

's lines from the 1592 play ''

The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus ''The'' () is a grammatical article in English, denoting persons or things already mentioned, under discussion, implied or otherwise presumed familiar to listeners, readers, or speakers. It is the definite article in English. ''The'' is the m ...

'', "Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?" In the tradition of humorous pseudounits, then, 1 millihelen is the amount of beauty needed to launch a single ship. According to '' The Rebel Angels'', a 1981 novel by

Robertson Davies William Robertson Davies (28 August 1913 – 2 December 1995) was a Canadian novelist, playwright, critic, journalist, and professor. He was one of Canada's best known and most popular authors and one of its most distinguished " men of letters" ...

, this system was invented by

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a university city and the county town in Cambridgeshire, England. It is located on the River Cam approximately north of London. As of the 2021 United Kingdom census, the population of Cambridge was 145,700. Cambridge bec ...

mathematician W.A.H. Rushton. In his 1992 collection of jokes and limericks,

Isaac Asimov yi, יצחק אזימאװ , birth_date = , birth_place = Petrovichi, Russian SFSR , spouse = , relatives = , children = 2 , death_date = , death_place = Manhattan, New York City, U.S. , nationality = Russian (1920–1922)Soviet (192 ...

claimed to have invented the term in the 1940s as a graduate student. In a 1958 letter to the ''

New Scientist ''New Scientist'' is a magazine covering all aspects of science and technology. Based in London, it publishes weekly English-language editions in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. An editorially separate organisation publishe ...

'', R.C. Winton proposes the millihelen as the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. In response, P. Lockwood noted that the unit had been independently proposed by Edgar J. Westbury and extended by the pair to negative values, where −1 millihelen was the amount of ugliness required to sink a battleship. Frank Muir or Denis Norden quoted it on the BBC Home Service/Radio Four quiz panel game 'My Word!', broadcast between 1956 and 1988.

Derived units

The Catalogue of Ships from Book II of ''

The Iliad The ''Iliad'' (; grc, Ἰλιάς, Iliás, ; "a poem about Ilium") is one of two major ancient Greek epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by modern audiences. As with the '' Ody ...

'', which describes in detail the commanders who came to fight for Helen and the ships they brought with them, details a total of 1,186 ships which came to fight the Trojan War. As such, Helen herself has a beauty rating of 1.186 helen, capable of launching ''more'' than one thousand ships. The "system" has been expanded by some writers, such as conceiving of negative values as measures of the ugliness required to ''beach'' a thousand ships. Writing a humorous article about the concept,

David Goines David Lance Goines (born 1945) is an American artist, calligrapher, typographer, printing entrepreneur, and author. He was born in Grants Pass, Oregon, the oldest of eight children. His father was a civil engineer and his mother a calligrapher an ...

considered a range of

metric prefix A metric prefix is a unit prefix that precedes a basic unit of measure to indicate a multiple or submultiple of the unit. All metric prefixes used today are decadic. Each prefix has a unique symbol that is prepended to any unit symbol. The pre ...

es to the unit, ranging from the attohelen (ah) which could merely "light up a Lucky while strolling past a shipyard", to the

tera TERA is a shielded twisted pair connector for use with Category 7 twisted-pair data cables, developed by The Siemon Company and standardised in 2003 by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) with the reference IEC 61076-3-104. Th ...

helen (Th) able to "launch the equivalent of one quadrillion Greek warships and make serious inroads on the welfare of the galaxy". Theoretical physicist

Thomas Fink Thomas Fink (born 1972) is an Anglo-American physicist, author and entrepreneur. He has published papers in statistical physics and its applications, written two books and designed an iPhone app. He set up the London Institute for Mathematica ...

defines beauty in ''The Man's Book'' both in terms of ships launched and in terms of the number of women, on average, than whom one woman will be more beautiful. He defines one ''helen'' (H) as the quantity of beauty to be more beautiful than 50 million women, the number of women estimated to have been alive in the 12th century

BCE Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) are year notations for the Gregorian calendar (and its predecessor, the Julian calendar), the world's most widely used calendar era. Common Era and Before the Common Era are alternatives to the or ...

. Fink also defines a related, but smaller unit called a “''helena''” (Ha), based on a

logarithmic scale A logarithmic scale (or log scale) is a way of displaying numerical data over a very wide range of values in a compact way—typically the largest numbers in the data are hundreds or even thousands of times larger than the smallest numbers. Such a ...

, like the

Richter scale The Richter scale —also called the Richter magnitude scale, Richter's magnitude scale, and the Gutenberg–Richter scale—is a measure of the strength of earthquakes, developed by Charles Francis Richter and presented in his landmark 1935 ...

, or

decibel The decibel (symbol: dB) is a relative unit of measurement equal to one tenth of a bel (B). It expresses the ratio of two values of a power or root-power quantity on a logarithmic scale. Two signals whose levels differ by one decibel have a po ...

s (dB). Ten helena (Ha) is the beauty sufficient for one oarsman (of which 50 are on a ship) to risk his life, or to be the most beautiful of a thousand women. Since the unit is logarithmic on a base of 2, for beauty to increase by 1 Ha, a woman must be the most beautiful of twice as many women, so one ''helen'' is equivalent to 25.6 Ha. The most beautiful woman who ever lived would score 34.2 Ha, the equivalent of 1.34 helen, the pick of a dozen women would be 3.6 Ha, or 0.14 helen.

References

{{reflist Units of measurement Humour Cultural depictions of Helen of Troy Beauty

Origin

Derived units

See also

References