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 StatesNational 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. 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.[3][4]
The hoax was mistakenly printed as fact in the IUPAC journal Chemistry International and subsequently retracted.[3][5] In reality, the litre derives its name from the litron, an old French unit of dry volume.
