People have always known about the tongue-burning, tear-inducing qualities of peppers. Before Wilbur Scoville, however, no one knew how to measure a pepper’s “heat”. The doodle team thought his work in this field—and the development of his eponymous Scoville Scale—deserved some recognition.
On his birthday, Google has saluted Scoville with an interactive Doodle that asks visitors to assist his experiments by cooling the chillies’ heat.
By clicking the mouse at the correct point on a sliding bar, you can fire ice cream at the offending chilli to neutralise it, with the game getting more difficult as they get hotter.
Scoville, an American chemist born 151 years ago on Friday, is responsible for the “Scoville organoleptic test”, a scale of “hotness” that has been the definitive rating of how spicy a chilli is for more than 100 years.
Born in Bridgeport Connecticut on January 22nd, 1865, Wilbur Lincoln Scoville was a chemist, award-winning researcher, professor of pharmacology and the second vice-chairman of the American Pharmaceutical Association.
The Scoville scale, which measures the concentration of capsaicin – the active component that gives chillies their hotness – runs from the bell pepper, with a rating of zero Scoville heat units (or SHU), to the 16 million that represents pure capsaicin.
The hottest chillies, such as the Carolina Reaper and Trinidad Moruga, can reach around 2 million SHU, and many of these have only been discovered in recent years. Just nine years ago, the Bhut Jolokia was the first to pass one million SHU. Tabasco sauce sits at 1200-1500, while the Jalapeno is at just 2,500-5,000. The Cayenne pepper is between 30,000 and 50,000.