Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre
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 accepts both the lower-case (<l>) and the upper-case (<L>) of the first letter in litre, because it is often difficult to distinguish between the character "l" and the digit "1" in certain fonts or when handwritten in certain languages, such as English. Usually, however, the International System of Units only permits the use of a capital letter when the unit is named after a person.[1]
Woolner perpetrated the 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 journal Chemistry International, and subsequently retracted.[2]
