A chemist invented a fake Frenchman to justify capital L for liters
by Ellsworth Toohey from Boing Boing on (#7770P)
The International System of Units capitalizes a unit's symbol only when the unit is named for a person, which leaves the liter with a lowercase l that is easy to mistake for a capital I or the numeral 1. In 1978 Kenneth Woolner of the University of Waterloo solved that by inventing the person: Claude Emile Jean-Baptiste Litre, born in 1716 to a maker of wine bottles, who over a long and distinguished career proposed a unit of volume that entered the metric system after his death in 1778. - Read the rest
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