flâneur

the man named after the litre

en.wikipedia.org · 326 words · saved by 1 readers

Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre (1716-1778) is a fictional character created in 1978 by Kenneth Woolner of the University of Waterloo to justify the use of a capital L to denote litres. The International System of Units usually only permits the use of a capital letter when a unit is named after a person.[1] The lower-case character l might be difficult to distinguish from the upper-case character I or the digit 1 in certain fonts and styles, and therefore both the lower-case (l) and the upper-case (L) are allowed as the symbol for litre. The United States National Institute of Standards and Technology now recommends the use of the uppercase letter L,[2] a practice that is also widely followed in Canada and Australia.[citation needed] Woolner perpetrated the April Fools' Day 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

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre (1716–1778) is a fictional character created in 1978 by Kenneth Woolner of the University of Waterloo to justify the use of a capital L to denote litres. The International System of Units usually only permits the use of a capital letter when a unit is named after a person.[1] The lower-case character l might be difficult to distinguish from the upper-case character I or the digit 1 in certain fonts and styles, and therefore both the lower-case (l) and the upper-case (L) are allowed as the symbol for litre. The United…

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