Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre

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Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre is a fictional character created in 1977 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. It is often difficult to distinguish between the character "l" and the digit "1" in certain fonts or 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 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 February 12th, 1716, the son of a manufacturer of wine bottles. Litre's fictional scientific 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.