How many of you have heard of Wilbur Scoville?
If you haven't, let Google enlighten you about him with the fantastic doodle they have come up with in memory of Scoville's 151st birth anniversary.
Scoville was the creator of the Scoville Organoleptic Test, a scale of "hotness" that has been the definitive rating of how spicy a chilli is.
Scoville, an American chemist, born in 1865 in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was also an award-winning researcher, and the second vice-chairman of the American Pharmaceutical Association. An article in India Today notes that his book, The Art of Compounding, makes one of the earliest mentions of milk as an antidote for pepper heat.
The Wilbur Scoville Google doodle includes a fun little game which then introduces us to the several kinds of chillies and peppers and also informs us about how hot they are compared to each other.
Once you click on the flame icon on the doodle, it takes you to a page which shows an animation of Scoville tasting chillies. Once he munches a chilli, a hand proceeds to offer him an ice cream. How many licks he takes off the ice cream is indicative of how hot the chilli is.
For example he takes merely a lick of the ice cream when he pops a bell pepper in his mouth. But when he eats cayenne peppers, he himself lunges at the ice-cream and swallows the whole thing.
Immediately after, you are directed to a page where you have click on a sliding bar to have ice creams thrown at chillies. The ice cream traps the chilli in a block of ice. The more fiery a chilli is, the more ice creams it takes to trap the chilli.
Having said that, since you will never get to throw ice creams around in real life, why not give it a try on the internet?
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