Wilbur Scoville
and his pimp-ass ways
Back in 1912, Detroit is still the "wild, wild west".There is no car industry yet and people gawk at dem rich city slicker folk with their automobiles, the NY Times just put up a huge electronic bulletin board in Times Square, and Coca-Cola costs 5 cents but doesn't quite "relieve fatigue" like it used to. There was the Roosevelt/Taft/Wilson presidential election, and - of course - the Titanic sinks.
A chemist named Wilbur Scoville was working for the Parke-Davis company, a Detroit drugstore founded in 1866 that built the world's first pharmacological research laboratory.
In 1902 the Parke-Davis Co. hired many an obsessed scientist to help them figure out fun, new things.
Fun, new things like narcotics development.
What kind of whack crazy drugs ? Click here
The industrious chemist however, pondered the age-old question that has plagued seekers of the burn forever : HOW THE FUCK do you measure heat?
Wilbur Scoville tried many different methods to measure the pungency of the chilli, but found the readings not precise and consistent. He tried to mix the chilli extract with different chemicals but was not successful. Scoville then found that subjective test were more successful.
Organoleptic Test
Wilbur Lincoln Scoville was born at the end of the Civil War in Bridgeport, Connecticut on January 22 1865, and died in 1942 at the age of 77.
On September 1, 1891 he married Cora B. Upham in Wollaston (Quincy, Massachusetts) and had two children with that bitch.
Hey, who says jug-eared chemists can't knock boots ?
The tongue being sensitive reacted to the pungency of
the chilli, so he devised the Organoleptic Test and developed
a scale system based on the Scoville heat unit which allows you to compare the heat factor in peppers and hot pepper sauces.
On September 1, 1891 he married Cora B. Upham in Wollaston (Quincy, Massachusetts) and had two children with that bitch.
Hey, who says jug-eared chemists can't knock boots ?
Taste testers would partake in a chilli chomping fest, and munch on ground-up chiles that were increasingly diluted (and presumably neutralized) by sugar water. The hotter the pepper, the more sugar water it took to quash the heat. So, the amount of sugar-water necessary to entirely cancel the heat in the pepper became the modern-day Scoville heat unit.
For example, the hottest pepper (a red savina habanero) recorded scored 577,000 Scoville heat units.
This means it would take 577,000 cups of sugar water to neutralize the heat in 1 cup of that pepper.
And thus, the Scoville Unit became a unit of measurement, not unlike a 'SHITLOAD' or a 'FUCKTON'.
There is however one setback :
The original test was limited by human subjectivity since different people have different heat tolerances.
Then, the heat for the same kind of pepper can also vary tremendously depending on how it's grown and when it is harvested. It is even possible for pods from the same plant to vary in hotness.
Now none of this crap has anything to do with Wilbur Scoville, other than to say that this was probably the perfect time to subject people to capsaicin-induced pain and then question them about it.
What could have driven young Wilbur to such fits of depravity and madness?
In 1922 he was awarded the Ebert Prize (given to "recognize the author(s) of the best report of original investigation of a medicinal substance"), and the Remington Honor Medal in 1929, the same year he received an honary Doctor of Science title from Columbia University...
We may assume this was for Scoville's work The Art of Compounding and not his Organoleptic Test.
"The Art of Compounding" was a hugely popular work, First published in 1895 it would become a pharmacological reference until *GASP* at least the 1960's (8+ editions) ! Scoville completely re-wrote a Harry Beckwith book in it's 4th revision : How To Get Registered: Home Study for Pharmaceutical Students in 1909, and wrote another book called "Extracts & Perfumes" containing hundreds of formulations...
But with 1914 bringing large-scale death and destruction worldwide, no one was interested in his pepper test.
Scoville is unknown because it wasn't important to the whole world...
Categorizing the heat levels of a plant no one eats ? Meh. Nobody cared. People were more interested in new inventions of the times and war. As far as The Art of Compounding goes, well, you'd have to be some nerdy apothecary geek to know or care - but then again : back then that scene would probably be larger than any chilehead community.
