WILBUR Lincoln Scoville may not be your normal hot guy with his keen interest in chemistry. (Still I haven’t met someone who loved chemistry other than those who are passionate about it. Like mathematics, chemistry is a love it or hate it thing. Few like it in high school and fewer still goes for it in college.) But in the quest for defining minute characteristics of chemicals that means something to ordinary human beings like most of us, Scoville certainly blazes the road he set for future generations. And providing a measure of hotness in chili was only one of many. Well, in 1912, while working for Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company, he devised the test and scale to measure piquancy (hotness) of chili peppers. But for this and his other achievements, he won the 1922 Ebert prize, the 1929 Remington Honor Medal, and an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Columbia University in the same year. The test bore Scoville’s name, and he called it then the Scoville Organoleptic Test. Late
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