What do you think of this fact?
How do you put a number on the burn of a chili? In 1912, the answer was: you make people taste it. And the reason behind it wasn’t dinner. It was a muscle rub.
A pharmacist with a burning problem
Wilbur Scoville was a pharmacist, born in 1865 in Bridgeport, Connecticut. In 1907, he moved to Detroit to work for the drug company Parke, Davis & Company. According to Fiery Foods Central, he was assigned to a warming salve called Heet, which was made with chile peppers. His job: standardize its chile content so the salve wouldn’t burn the skin.
To do that, he needed a way to measure how hot the peppers were. In 1912, he presented his solution at the annual meeting of the American Pharmaceutical Association in Denver.
Tongues as measuring instruments
The method, known as the organoleptic test, was simple. A pepper extract was mixed with sugar water and handed to a panel of tasters. The mix was diluted further and further until the heat was just barely perceptible, as MCPHS describes it. A 1920 description quoted by Fiery Foods Central gets specific: soak 0.1 grams of ground capsicum overnight in 100 milliliters of alcohol, then add that tincture to water sweetened with 10 percent sugar.
How much dilution it took became the score: the Scoville Heat Unit. A bell pepper sits at 0. According to the Wellcome Collection, jalapeños rate 3,500 to 8,000. Pepper X, MCPHS says, comes in at 2.69 million.
From tongues to machines
Today, chromatography has taken over from the tasting panel, Fiery Foods Central notes. The name stuck anyway: chili heat is still given in Scoville Heat Units, and the man behind it has become a bit of a legend.
Bonus fact: According to MCPHS, the New York Times called Scoville the “Pope of Peppers”, and in 2016 he got a Google Doodle on his 151st birthday.
So every chili heat ranking you have ever seen started out as quality control for a muscle rub.