Google has produced a little doddle on the day Wilber Scoville was born. They explanin who he is and how he started to measure and create a heat scale for chillies. Below are a fe articles from the main newspapers in the UK all talking about our beloved Scoville Scale and it's history:

Google

People have known about the tongue-burning, tear-inducing qualities of peppers long before Columbus reached the Americas. 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.

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. 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 pugency in peppers.

Doodler Olivia Huynh has been thinking about Scoville and his test since last summer. From the start it was clear it was going to be a chance to do something fun. She writes:

Spiciness is somewhat of a universal, comical experience, which I think opened the door for us to do something we usually might not be able to, like a fighting game. I started making storyboards for how the game could unfold while engineers worked on building prototypes. Then I started sketching and making draft art to put in the prototype, so we could see what the experience would be like in interactive form.

After that I started working on backgrounds, boss characters, meters, and then all the character animations, and ending animations. At some point we thought about setting it in a human mouth, to clarify things, but then realized that was probably too weird (thankfully). Designing the boss peppers and animating Scoville's reactions to eating them were probably my favorite parts.

Happy birthday, Wilbur!

The Telegraph

Who was Wilbur Scoville? The science behind what makes chillies so hot

The inventor of the Scoville test has been commemorated with a Google Doodle on his 151st birthday

Hot chilli peppers have been credited with helping to lose weight, inducing labour and relieving pain. But until Wilbur Scoville, there was no objective way of measuring how hot chillies really are.

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.

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.

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.

• The big chilli sauce guide

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.

Capsaicin is the compound that gives you the characteristic burning sensation in your mouth, when you eat chillies.