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Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre is a fictional character created in 1978 by Kenneth Woolner of the University of Waterloo in order to justify the use of a capital L to denote litres.
The International System of Units uses the character "l" (lower-case L) to denote the metric unit of volume litre. In English-speaking countries it is often difficult to distinguish between the character "l" and the digit "1" when handwritten. Although this potential confusion could be remedied by using the upper-case L to represent litres, the International System of Units only permits the use of a capital letter when the unit is named after a person.
Woolner perpetrated the hoax in Chem 13, a newsletter concerned with chemistry for school teachers. According to the hoax, Claude Litre was born on February 12th, 1716, the son of a manufacturer of wine bottles. Litre's fictional scientific career was extremely distinguished during the course of which he purportedly proposed a unit of volume measurement that was after his death in 1778 incorporated into the International System of Units.
External links
- Extract from the University of Waterloo gazette describing the hoax (http://www.student.math.uwaterloo.ca/~stat231/stat231_01_02/w02/section3/fi1.2.pdf)
- Metric system FAQ (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/metric-system-faq.txt)