Interesting as well that litre/liter isn't even a "proper" SI unit; it's just a nickname for a cubic decimetre/decimeter held over from France's original metric system.
I also like to imagine that the path to working for the BIPM is not always a glorious one: "Jacques, you have spent the last three years of your post-doctoral fellowship trying to settle on the units you wish to use in your abstract. We think we have found the perfect place for your skillset..."
Out of curiosity, i read the report of the meeting of this comittee, and in all the preparatory work they only mention the fact that countries converting to the International System of Units were struggling with l and were largely using L. The fact that it might be because some people think it's a proper noun is not possible (they simply state that it does not come from a person's name, period) and the fact that the confusion might come from this april fool's joke is not mentionned anywhere.
From what I understand, a unit shouldn't be capitalized unless it's named after someone. The problem with litre is that a lowercase l looks like a 1 which can really mess up a measurement. People started using uppercase, but some purists bucked the trend. That's when Claude Emile was made up. Because some journals thought it was true, more people got convinced to use the uppercase L for Litre.
She was a hefty one, oh boy.
Based on the title I thought someone sacrificed their kid's name for the Litre
I'd love a systematic solution for 1l, O0 and also rarer traps like rnm. The time that gets wasted on errors caused by the first 2 is not negligible. There's only 2x26 letters in the alphabet and 10 Arabic numerals, it shouldn't be too hard to make them all distinctly unique.
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After other reading, it sounds like capital L was already in common use, and likely the SI or whatever committee just decided to allow L regardless to avoid confusion. This sounds like a tall tale which can't be disproved (how do we really know the motivations of the committee etc) so now it spreads.
Also the Wikipedia article wasn't clear, the invention of Claude Emile Jean-Baptiste Litre was an April fool's joke in a scientific magazine that went over people's heads.
save