Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre is a fictional character created in 1978 by Kenneth Woolner of the

University of Waterloo The University of Waterloo (UWaterloo, UW, or Waterloo) is a public research university with a main campus in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is on of land adjacent to "Uptown" Waterloo and Waterloo Park. The university also operates ...

to justify the use of a capital L to denote

litre The litre (international spelling) or liter (American English spelling) (SI symbols L and l, other symbol used: ℓ) is a metric unit of volume. It is equal to 1 cubic decimetre (dm3), 1000 cubic centimetres (cm3) or 0.001 cubic metre (m3 ...

s. The International System of Units usually only permits the use of a capital letter when a unit is named after a person. It is often difficult to distinguish between the character "l" and the digit "1" in certain fonts or handwriting, and therefore both the lower-case (l) and the upper-case (L) are allowed as the symbol for ''litre''. The

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territori ...

National Institute of Standards and Technology The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency of the United States Department of Commerce whose mission is to promote American innovation and industrial competitiveness. NIST's activities are organized into physical s ...

now recommends the use of the uppercase letter L, a practice that is also widely followed in

Canada Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...

and Australia. Woolner perpetrated the

April Fools' Day April Fools' Day or All Fools' Day is an annual custom on 1 April consisting of practical jokes and hoaxes. Jokesters often expose their actions by shouting "April Fools!" at the recipient. Mass media can be involved in these pranks, which may ...

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. The hoax was mistakenly printed as fact in the

IUPAC The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC ) is an international federation of National Adhering Organizations working for the advancement of the chemical sciences, especially by developing nomenclature and terminology. It is ...

journal ''Chemistry International'' and subsequently retracted.

References

External links

Reprints of articles about the Litre hoax
{{DEFAULTSORT:Claude Emile Jean-Baptiste Litre Hoaxes in science Litre, Claude Emile Jean-Baptiste 1978 in science Hoaxes in Canada 1978 in Canada 1978 hoaxes Non-SI metric units Fictional characters introduced in 1978 Fictitious entries

See also

References

External links