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 scientifc 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.
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