#1.2 University of Waterloo STAT 2 31 --W.H.Cherry

Figure1.2. DAT A-BASED INVESTIGAT ING:Accuracy of Information 1

EM9524: The Globe and Mail, April 7,1995, page A28 The named for famous scientists (, sed a statute legalizing metric measures and )and one is named for trade and abolishing the penalty for This is the 200th anniversary of the birth for a wine merchant -- Claude Emile using or having in one’s p ossession a of the metric system, in . Jean -Baptiste Litre. weight or measure of that system. • The system has sevenfundamental, or • Use of the system has spread interna- Sources:Collier’s E ncyclopedia , Ency- base, measures. Manymetr ic units are tionally.In1897,for instance, Britain pas- clopedia Britannica (1911 ).

REFERENCE: Collier’s E ncyclopedia, Macmillan Educational Company, N ew York, and P.F.Collier,Inc.,London & NewYork (1987), 16, page 69 states that The liter,ametr ic or capacity,isna- med for a founding father of the metric system,Claude Emile Jean -Baptiste Litre, whose family sold wine in the first litre(liter)bottles to bear the name. (The same statement appears in the 1992 edition, Vo lume 16, page 69.) [Waterloo Public Library call number: 031Col V.161987]

In viewofthe item reprinted above from the Social Studies section on the back page of Section A of The Globe and Mail,the following information is of interest; it is partofanarticle, by Linda J.Howe, entitled ‘P leasureisperforming’ for 37-year teacher about Professor Ken Woolner at the time of his retirement from the Department of Physics at the University of Waterloo.

EM9529: University of Waterloo Gazette, May 17, 1995, page 1 [Prof.Woolner]remembers with glee the abbreviation of the litre measurement as a piece of sober historical research", one scientific hoax he helped perpetrate. to be "L"instead of "l",toavoid confusion Woolner wrote ten years later."The idea He and chemistry professor RegFriesen with the figure 1."But the rules of nomen- wastogiv e astraightforward account are "responsible for adding one person to clature of the Confe´rence Ge´ne´rale des with correct dates and accurate historical the grand sweep of history"--Claude Poids et Mesures require that upper-case details, but with one person added to the E´ mile Jean-Baptiste Litre. letters be reserved for units which are great stream of history.Sothat’s h ow I Litre was "born" during a crippling named for individual scientists ", W oolner wrote it". blizzard in a hotel room in Ottawa,in says. "Since no such person existed for And overthe years other scientists filled December 1977.But his creators told the the litre measurement, it seemed reason- in missing sections to Litre’s b iography. world he had been bornFebruary 12, 1716 able one should be invented". "Itwas clear that a great deal of innocent in France. Litre evenhad a list of scien- Woolner wrote a study of Litre for the pleasure was being had by one and all", tific accomplishments that Woolner crea- Apr il 1978 issue of Chem 13News,asci- Woolner says. ted. For ten years, much of the world be- ence publication from Waterloo geared Infor mation about Litre started appear- lieveditall. mainly for high school teachers. ing in international publications, and even The idea for Litre was Friesen’s ,Wool- "I realized that drama, revolution and made the CBC radio program "Quirks and ner says. It originated with a technical romance were all very good, but the joke Quarks ". E ventually the deception had to quibble: Some chemists wanted to make would be better if the article came across be put to rest.

1 Outline, in point form, the lesson(s) relevant to data-based investigating (or data-based problem solving)that can be lear ned from the articles reprinted above. • Descr ibe br iefly the danger (s) you consider are involved in this type of scientific hoax.

Five other articles, which provide further information about this matter,followinchronological order in this Figure; the reader should consult the original source for the illustrations in the first article. The assistance of Prof.Lewis J. Brubacher,Depar tment of Chemistry,University of Waterloo, in providing copies of the articles is gratefully acknow- ledged. The ar ticle from CHEM 13News is reprinted for teaching purposes at the University of Waterloo with the kind per mission of the copyright holder.

CHEM 13 News, September,1988, Number 178, pages 43-45

One of the most memorable articles we evercar ried in CHEM 13NEWSwas Ken Woolner’sshor t biographyofClaude E´ mile Jean-Baptiste Litre. We repr int it here, complete with introduction, illustrations and final Editors’note as it ap- peared in our April 1978 issue. Be sure to read Ken’s f ollowup article, The LitreStory.Ken calls himself a physicist but revels (some would say,mucks about) in science history.Weare also informed that Ken’s g randfather,who lovedtopull offpublic spoofs, was the cause of the phrase (nowcor rupted),"to pull the Woolner" oversomeone’s e yes.

95 - 04-20 (continued overleaf ) University of Waterloo STAT 2 31 --W.H.Cherry

CLAUDE EMILE JEAN-BAPTISTE LITRE (1716 -1778) KenA.Woolner cal glassware. By the end of the year Litre’s b usiness had quad- Department of Physics rupled!Overthe course of the 1750s, Litre completely out-strip - University of Waterloo ped his competitors, and owned a virtual monopoly on all chem- Waterloo ON N2L 3G1 ical apparatus. Through the ’60s and early ’70s, Litre’s l abora- tory equipment became a tradition in France, and perhaps contri- (Reprinted from CHEM 13NEWS, April , 1978) buted as much to "La Re´volution Chymique"asdid Lavoisier (In celebration of the 200th anniversary of the death of this great (1743 -1794) himself. investigator,the Confe´rence Ge´ne´rale des Poids et Mesures has Not that Litre may be compared to Lavoisier as a chemist -- decided to use his name for the SI unit of volume.The official indeed Litre always claimed to be completely ignorant of the abbreviation will be L,following the standardprescription of subject!But he was much more than a very successful business - using capital lettersfor units named for individuals.) man. By the time he was 40, he had made his fortune, and he left the running of his business to others, while he devoted him- Claude E´ mile Jean-Baptiste Litre was bornonFebruary 12, 1716, self to what has provedtobehis lasting claim to fame -- the in the village of Margaux in the heartofthe Me´doc region of accurate measurement of volume. France. His father was a manufacturer of wine-bottles, as had Before Litre, no one had evermade an accurate cylinder of been his grandfather and great grandfather.Indeed, Litre bottles clear glass, and yet his cylinders var ied in internal diameter by had been a vital adjunct of the Bordeaux wine industry since the less than 0.1% overtheir whole length. And no one, before 1620s. This family tradition of concernfor the problems of liq- Litre, had so precisely graduated a cylinder of glass -- into uid containment, and knowledge of the properties of glass, was tenths, hundredths, and sometimes eventhousandths!His gradu- undoubtedly a major influence upon Litre’s l ater work on the ated cylinders, and his burettes (he invented the device, and its measurement of volume. name)were coveted by chemists all overEurope. By the age of 16, Litre had demonstrated a budding mathemati- His major written work, the E´tudes Volume´triques of 1763, was cal talent, and he was sent to Par is to study with Pierre de Mau- translated into English in 1764byJoseph Priestley (1733 -1804), per tuis (1698 -1759),who became his scientific mentor. and into German in 1767byKarl Wilhelm Scheele (1742 -1786). The most important scientific controversy of the 1730s concer- In the preface to his translation, Priestleypraised Litre’s w ork as ned the correctness of the Newtonian theory of the Earth. Accor- aconsummate example of the fact that, "... all things (and partic- ding to Newton (16 42-1727),the figure of the Earth should be an ularly whateverdepends upon science)hav e of late years been in oblate spheroid, bulging at the equator and flattened at the poles, aquicker progress towards perfection than ever". this shape being a centrifugal effect of the Earth’s r otation. The Litre visited England in 1765toreceive a special gold medal Acade´mie des Sciences decided to test the theory by measuring struck in his honour by the Royal Society.Inretur n, he donated the curvatures of the Earth’s s urface at the equator and in the far to the Society a set of his graduated cylinders. Unfortunately nor th. Accordingly,in1735 the great geographer La Condamine these cylinders did not survive the exper iments of Sir Humphry (1701 -1774) led a surveying expedition to Peru, and in 1736 Mau- Davy (1778 -1829),who made nitrogen trichlor ide in them in 1812. per tuis mounted a simiiar expedition to Swedish Lapland. The Litre’s l ater years were spent basking in the fame and adulation young Litre was invited to join the expedition as Maupertuis’ heaped upon him by the savants of Par is, and spiced by an un- assistant. ending sequence of patent litigations against German, Veneian, In Sweden, the liaison between the French party and Swedish and Bohemian glass-makers. Although he was the recipient of officialdom was handled by Anders (1701 -1744),the pro- ev ery civil honour that France could bestow, Litre was neverad- fessor of astronomy at the University of Uppsala. Celsius trav- mitted to the Acade´mie des Sciences, eventhough he made ap- elled to Lapland with the expedition as the official representative paratus for all the Acade´miciens, and was regarded as a friend of the Royal Swedish Academy,and during the summer of 1736, by manyofthem. It is rumoured that Litre was kept out by the Litre and Celsius became firmfriends. There is no doubt that politicking of Lavoisier,who did not want the aristocratic atmos- Celsius’preoccupation with precise measurement, and his dedi- phere defiled by a "fournisseur.L " itre refused to allowhimself to cation to the centigrade division of measured quantities, had a be upset by this lack of official recognition by the scientific profound influence on Litre’s l ater decision to pursue a career as establishment. Indeed, it seems that Litre neverallowed himself ascientific instrument-maker. to be upset by anything -- he was a patient, phlegmatic individ- The next 15years of Litre’s l ife are shrouded in mystery.Pre - ual, not giventoargumentation. He wasabstemious, hard-work- sumably he returned to Par is after the successful completion of ing, and in the best of health when he was cut down prematurely the expedition, and it is generally believedthat he established his on August 5, 1778, during the cholera epidemic of that year. instr ument making business in 1740. But very little hard infor- In his E´tudes Volume´triques Litre had chosen, for his standard mation is available. There is one unsubstantiated reportthat he volume, a measure very close to the old flac5 on royal of HenriIV, visited NewFrance and attempted to repeat the Lapland mea- introduced in 1595 to standardize the taxation of wine. However, surements, and another account that has him back in Bordeaux, he recognized the arbitrariness of this unit, and suggested that in perfecting his glass making techniques!The paucity of anyrationalized system of units, volume could be specified in infor mation on this period of Litre’s l ife, and the wide diver- ter ms of a standard of a standard liquid. He suggested gences and inconsistencies between the few"facts"that are avail- mercury.But Litre’s d ream of a rationalized system of units did able, has provedvery frustrating for historians of the period. If not starttomater ialize until 15years after his death, when the anyreader of CHEM 13NEWShas good information to offer, mathematician Lagrange (1736 -1813) wasappointed to head a the editors would be delighted to receive it. commission to drawupsuch a system. And in 1795 the metric There is, however, nodoubt at all that by 1751Litre was very system was born. well established. In September of that year Guillaume Rouell Litre’s m ethod of specifying volume was adopted, although the (1703 -1770),the famous demonstrator in chemistry at the Jardin commission decided to use distilled rather than mercury as du Roi, gav e apublic lecture on LesMe´thodes de Chimie which the standard liquid. The chemist Antoine de Fourcroy (1755 - wasnothing less than a detailed demonstration of Litre’s c hemi- 1809),who had studied instrument-making in Litre’s f actory be-

95 - 04-20 (continued) #1.3 University of Waterloo STAT 2 31 --W.H.Cherry Figure1.2. DATA-BASED INVESTIGAT ING:Accuracy of Information 1 (continued) fore his great work on nomenclature with Lavoisier,was appar- from the general literatureofthe period. Apparently Litredid ently the first to suggest that Litre’s n ame be used for the unit of not keep a journal,the correspondence with Celsius has been volume. lost, and of course chemical glasswaredoes not , so thereare (Editors’ note:Ken Woolner tells us that the details of Litre’slife no extant examples of Litre’sskill. Perhaps our readerscan help arevery hardtoestablish , and most of this account was inferred to flesh out this sketch.)

Chemical & Engineering News, January 14, 1980, page 64 Chance reader rounds out life of Claude Litre K. M.Reese Arecent issue of the International News- Litre, according to Paul, went to Sand- ing to Woolner.Dur ing the 1760’sand letter on Chemical Education,published wich, on Cape Cod, in 1736 to serveas early 1770 ’sheenjoyed virtually a mono- by the International Union of Pure and consultant to an infant glass works. While. poly in the field. His graduated cylinders Applied Chemistry,carried a brief bio- there he met Josiah , a local cran- and burettes in particular were coveted all graphyofClaude E´ mile Jean-Baptiste ber ry magnate, who was struggling to de- overEurope. ( ) Litre 1716 -78 ,the chap the liter was na- sign a vessel for measuring his produce. Litre’s p assion was the accurate measure- med after.Author K. A. Woolner of the The common measure of dry capacity at ment of volume. His masterwork, E´tudes University of Waterloo, in Ontario, Cana- the time was the basket, but the Volume´triques,was published in 1763. He da, remarked that the details of Litre’s l ife cranber ries kept falling between the slats. wasnev eradmitted to the Acade´mie des were hard to come by and that 15years of Anyway,Litre and Barrel put their heads Sciences, owing, it is said, to politicking ( ) it 1736 - 51 were "shrouded in mystery". together and created the cranberry barrel. in high places. However, in1765hewas Mar tin Paul of Merrick, N.Y., saw the Eventually,Litre married Barrel’s o nly givenagold medal struck in his honor by newsletter and wrote to its editor,D.J. daughter.The couple had a daughter,bor n England’s R oyal Society.Inretur n, Litre Waddington of the University of York, in in Sandwich and named Millicent. The gave the society a set of his graduated England, that he was in a position to fill milliliter,says Paul, almost certainly was cylinders. Sadly,the cylinders did not the gap. He did so, and a copyofhis let- named after her. survive the exper iments of Sir Humphry ter has been obtained from William Spin- Later Litre made a fortune manufactur- Davy,who made nitrogen trichlor ide in del at the National Academy of Sciences. ing chemical apparatus in France, accord- them in 1812.

CHEM 13 News, September,1988, Number 178, pages 45 -46 THE LITRE STORY KenA.Woolner revolution and romance were all very good, but the jokewould Department of Physics University of Waterloo be better if the article came across as a piece of sober historical Waterloo ON N2L 3G1 research. The idea was to give a straightforward account with cor rect dates and accurate historical details, but with one person Claude E´ mile Jean-Baptiste Litre was borndur ing acrippling added to the great stream of history.Sothat’s h ow I wrote it, and blizzard, in a hotel room in Ottawa,inDecember of 1977.Reg Ithought it came out very well. Giventhe possibility that some Friesen and I were there on an expedition to visit a fewhigh readers might miss the jokesimply by not recognizing the signif- schools, hoping to find out whytheir students seemed to perform icance of the fact that the article appeared in the April issue of much better than the average on UW’sprize exams, the CHEM the magazine, I made sure that the captions to the illustrations 13 NEWSExam and the SIN Test. Not that we found out any- were obviously funny, and I left a 15-year gap in Litre’s l ife so thing of the sort, of course, but we were well received, and en- that others could contribute to the story. joyed our visits immensely,especially at the school where we The immediate response to the article made me feel very good had the salutary exper ience of taking overthe morning classes of indeed. Several readers went along with the game, filling in teachers who were snowed in at home! some of my missing details, particularly on the life of Litre’s The idea for Litre came from Reg, who told me that a group of daughter Millie. Ialso found that I had been "scooped" by Bruce U. S.chemists (Ibelieve)had proposed that the common abbrevi- Dodd of the Canadian Government Specifications Board, who ation for the unit of volume should be changed to "L", onthe had published a "Research Note"onMarco Guiseppe Litroni in grounds that the "l" then in use was confusing for both readers the June 1977 issue of Standards Engineering.The link between and typists. But the rules of nomenclature of the Confe´rence Litroni and Litre was provided in 1979 by Steve Mar riott of the Ge´ne´rale des Poids et Mesures require that upper-case letters be Br itish Standards Institution, who speculated that the name "Litre" reserved for units which are named for individual scientists, and wasadopted by Litroni when he settled in France after a mafia- since no such person existed for "L", i tseemed reasonable that induced flight from his native Tuscany! The best pseudo-histo - .. one should be invented. Regsuggested that I should write a rical contributions came from T.J.Kukkamaki of the Helsinki "biography" for the April issue of CHEM 13NEWS, and over Geodetic Institute, (agenuine exper t on Maupertuis’expedition the course of an evening (which included, I think I recall, most to Lapland),who provided detailed evidence to showthat Litre of a bottle of scotch)wegenerated much of the substance of an had stayed on in Sweden after the rest of Maupertuis’par ty had 18th century life, full of drama, revolution and romance. retur ned to France in 1737.InSeptember 1979,the article was When I actually sat down to write the article (amonth or so later, repr inted in IUPAC’s International Newsletter on Chemical Edu- after quite a fewreminders from Reg), I realized that drama, cation.Editor D.J.Waddington receivedsome further contribu-

95 - 04-20 (continued overleaf ) University of Waterloo STAT 2 31 --W.H.Cherry tions to the Litre story,which he shared with us. It was clear that one fictional biography. ( Even Rayburne, the only classic expo - agreat deal of innocent pleasure was being had by one and all. nent of the genre, was neverable to repeat the success of his full- My article was a success. length biographyofThos. Crapper.) Which is a shame, since in There is a special corner of Hell reserved for failed humorists, the course of writing the Litre piece, I thought of several individ- and the first indication that a place was being prepared for me uals who really should have some sortofbiographical memorial. came as early as November 1978, when a college librarian wrote (It’s v ery hard to stop, once you’v e star ted!) As my own personal from California requesting "... anyinfor mation and sources you contr ibution to this special issue of CHEM 13NEWSand its have used in the preparation of this most interesting article ". A readers, I offer the following capsule sketches, upon which you rash of similar requests was triggered by the International News - might liketoexpand. letter version of the article, which had all my words but had omit- Rodrigues d'Ombreija -- Sixteenth-century Portuguese naviga - ted the illustrations and their captions, which didn’t fitinto the tor who brought the parasol from China. newsletter ’sformat. The BigEvent which turned my "spoof " into Thomas Flange -- Foreman in Stephenson’s f actory,whose in- a"literary hoax"came in January 1980, when a precis of the ar- vention made it possible for us to have railways rather than ticle appeared in Chemistry International,another IUPAC news- grooveways. letter.This rewr ite wasbased on the International Newsletter Sir Horace RajendraBungaloo -- Knighted by Queen Victoria version of the article, and stripped the thing right down to the for his contributions to domestic architecture. essentials of Litre’s l ife, leaving a very good piece of reportage v mar red only by the fact that the writer actually took the original Bratislav Parsec -- Turn -of-the -century director of the Prague ser iously! Observatory. Unfor tunately,itwas the Chemistry International version which REQUIESCAT I NPACE seems to have been most widely read, and this was the version which, together with the editor’sapology for not recognizing the The man who lies here, deceased, hoax, made it into Robert ’s MoreRandom Walks in Science. Wastrained as a Catholic priest. The Chemistry International version got Litre on to the radio, on With help from St. Peter the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s s cience magazine show, He invented the litre, Quirks and Quarks.Itwas also the version which the editors of That infamous Claude Jean-Baptiste. The New York Times so roundly castigated as theyindignantly (Found engraved on a tombstone in a Waterloo cemetery by Gerry. "put the deception to rest!" To ogood of UW's C hemistry Department. Apparently,Litre's All things considered, the creation of Litre provided me with a body was among those sent overseas for burial when the 1778 great deal of amusement for a number of years, and didn’t doany choleraepidemic produced morevictims than Frenchcemeteries real harm, although I did hear that he’d m ade it into a textbook! could handle.Note the newevidence that Litrestudied theo- My only regret is that it seems that one should only everwrite logy,possibly during the "15 -year gap"from1736 to 1751.)

Winnipeg FreePress, February 28, 1989,page 1

13 News. Phone______yLitreevaporates The reportwas called a "masterly ac- count" with "an abundance of corrobora - Canadian professors created metric father overscotch tive detail"byone Australian journal. The Canadian Press "Itwas fun just to sit back and watch as But most scientists got the joke. Some KITCHENER, Ont. -- He was a giant of the thing developed",recalls Ken Wool- joined the fun, creating a daughter for science who left shoes that were impossi- ner,now anassociate physics professor, Litre, named Millie, said Woolner. ble to fill. who created Litre with RegFriesen, assis- The prank unravelled when a summary His name was Claude Emile Jean-Bap - tant dean of science. of the article made its way into a news - tiste Litre (1716 -1778),French maker of It beganwhen Friesen heard the 16th letter of the International Union of Pure wine bottles and father of the metric litre, General Conference on Weights and Mea- and Applied Chemistry,prompting mixed revealed to the modern world in a 1978 sures was considering changing the ab- reactions. edition of a University of Waterloo maga- breviation of litre from l to L. "Itisassumed that communications from zine. established scientists are sincere ", s aid the But he left a trail that led modern scien- `It seemed reasonable' miffed editor of More Random Walks in tists nowhere because he was a phantom, Since capital letters are used for units Science,ananthology published by The ajoke. He neverexisted. named after individuals, "it seemed rea- Institute of Physics in Bristol and London. Ye tthis fantasy child of twouniversity sonable that one should be invented", Alocal high school teacher recently professors, conceivedoverglasses of Woolner said. wrote to Chem 13News complaining that scotch, fooled scientific journals, the Ne w So Jean-Baptiste Litre was bornwith an until he read Woolner ’sexplanation, he York Times and the CBC. ar ticle in the April 1978 edition of Chem had been teaching his students about Litre.

Chemical & Engineering News, May 8, 1995, page 63

Moreonmetres add a fewpoints and clarify some others? for the accurate measurement of volume SIR: As an active proponent of the metric ..... that he named his daughter Millicent system since 1940, I welcome the letter of Litre is the only correct spelling be- (C&EN, Jan. 14,1980, page 64). James G. Van Oot (Going metric -- pro- cause it is named after the father of vol- Kenneth A. Hooton perly,C&EN, Feb.6,page 36).May I ume, Claude Litre. Such was his passion SierraVista , Ariz.

95 - 04-20