A chemist invented a fake Frenchman to justify capital L for liters

The metric system has a little problem: the symbol for liter is a lowercase l, easy to confuse with a capital I or the numeral 1. Per Boing Boing, one researcher solved this with inspired mischief. In nineteen seventy-eight, Kenneth Woolner from the University of Waterloo simply invented a Frenchman: Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre, born in seventeen sixteen to a wine bottle maker, who spent a long career proposing units of measurement before dying in seventeen seventy-eight. Since the metric system capitalizes unit symbols only when named after a real person, Woolner's fictional Frenchman justified giving the liter its capital L—a hack that somehow stuck.

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