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Google Doodle Scoville Actually Wasn’t A Chef At All — So Why The Peppers?

By Antonio J. Newell
Published on: 13:50 PST, Jan 22, 2016

Google Doodle Scoville — Wilbur Scoville, that is — wasn’t a chef. He was a scientist, a chemist to be specific. So, what did peppers have to do with anything?

Well, during his years of scientific advancement, Wilbur Scoville worked for a pharmaceutical company called Parke-Davis. The Google Doodle of Wilbur Scoville shows him wearing a lab coat, not chef’s clothing. Although he’s holding a pepper — not the Carolina Reaper — the truth is that Scoville studied and conducted experiments on peppers for the development of a topical pain reliever.

Actually, according to Vox, the Google Doodle honoree was attempting to improve upon the company’s painkilling cream, Heet liniment. In order to make the cream better, Wilbur Scoville needed to extract capsaicin from peppers.

WebMD states that capsaicin is an ingredient found, specifically, in hot peppers. It’s a natural pain reliever. The source quotes as follows.

“Capsaicin works by first stimulating and then decreasing the intensity of pain signals in the body. Although pain may at first increase, it usually decreases after the first use. Capsaicin stimulates the release of a compound believed to be involved in communicating pain between the nerves in the spinal cord and other parts of the body.”

Google Doodle Scoville’s work was so significantly profound in this area that a method was captured in history as the “Scoville scale,” which measures peppers in heat units. Essentially, Scoville developed a way to measure the spice levels in peppers.

Vox reports that, now, capsaicin levels can be measured by high-performance liquid chromatography. However, in Wilbur Scoville’s era, levels had to be determined by taste. So, essentially as a solution, the Scoville scale works by measuring the amount of sugar it takes to fully counteract the pepper’s spice level.

According to Scoville, capsaicin is what triggers the burning sensation in a person’s mouth. After this happens, the body does its job of responding via endorphins. To gauge Scoville’s method, the source reports as follows.

“While jalapeños generally clock in at 2,500 to 8,000 Scoville heat units and habaneros get up to 100,000 to 350,000 SHU, the Indian ghost chili packs a walloping 1 million SHU and was proclaimed the world’s spiciest pepper by the Guinness Book of World Records in 2007. But in 2012, it was surpassed by the Trinidad moruga scorpion and then in 2013 by the Carolina Reaper, which continues to hold the title today. The Reaper, developed by Ed Currie’s PuckerButt Pepper Company, rates a staggering 1.5 million SHU.”

As mentioned earlier, the Scoville scale is measured in heat units or SHUs. So, if you bite into a Carolina Reaper, you may be in for quite the sweaty, wild “doodle.”

While the Google Doodle honoree felt that sugar could alleviate the issue, it might be a wise decision to have plenty of desserts near by to help counteract the madness that would ensue your mouth.

Nonetheless, it has also come into question why Google even created a doodle for Scoville. Why is Google Doodle Scoville the man to honor? Well, aside from his obvious achievements, Google is celebrating Wilbur’s birthday. According to Telegraph, Scoville was born 151 years ago on Friday, January 22, and is responsible for the aforementioned heat scale that “has been the definitive rating of how spicy a chile is for more than 100 years.”

On the Google homepage, the Scoville doodle allows users to play along in an effort to extinguish the chile peppers’ rage. The sources states, “By clicking the mouse at the correct point on a sliding bar, you can fire ice cream at the offending chile to neutralize it, with the game getting more difficult as they get hotter.”

Feel free to enjoy the perks of the interactive Google Doodle Scoville application at the aforementioned link. All in all, what are your thoughts about Wilbur Scoville? Did you think he was a chef? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

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