Google celebrates the 151st birthday of Wilbur Scoville - the man behind the Scoville Scale, by which the spiciness of chili peppers are measured - as the company changes their home page art to a portrait of Scoville, with various chili peppers as its background.
To commemorate Scoville, Google also created a Google Doodle Game that lets internet users to beat the heat by hitting anthropomorphic peppers with balls of different flavored ice cream, reported Time on Friday.
Born on Jan, 22 1865 at Bridgeport, Connecticut, Wilbur Lincoln Scoville grew up to be a pharmacist and developed the "Scoville Organoleptic Test" or simply, the Scoville Scale, in 1912 while employed at the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company.
Scoville was awarded a couple of times, including the American Pharmaceutical Association's Ebert prize in 1922, as well as the Remington Honor Medal in 1929.
Also in 1929, Scoville received from Columbia University an honorary Doctor of Science.
According to IBN Live on Friday, Google regards Scoville as "a chemist, award-winning researcher, professor of pharmacology and the second vice-chairman of the American Pharmaceutical Association. His book, 'The Art of Compounding,' makes one of the earliest mentions of milk as an antidote for pepper heat. He is perhaps best remembered for his organoleptic test, which uses human testers to measure pungency in peppers."
To measure peppers in the Scoville Scale, a dried pepper is dissolved using alcohol in order to extract its heat components known as capsinoids. The resulting product is further diluted to a sugar-water solution.
The concentrated capsinoids will then be analyzed by five trained testers until at least three of them are no longer able to detect the spiciness in a given dilution. The spiciness of a pepper is rated in multiples of 100 Scoville heat units (SHU) based on the dilution.
In the scale, bell pepper is considered the least hot of all peppers with a rating of zero. Jalapeno is rated 1,000 to 4,000 SHU, bird's eye chili at 100,000 to 225,000 SHU, while carolina reaper is rated the hottest at 1,600,000 to 2,200,000 SHU.
