Today marks the 151st birthday of Wilbur Scoville , the mind behind the eponymously named Scoville Scale, which measures how spicy chili peppers are and ranks them accordingly. Since Spiceworks sort of uses the Scoville Scale for one or two things, we couldn’t let today go without recognizing the guy who first devised a way to measure just how spicy things are.
Born on January 22, 1865, in Bridgeport, CT, Wilbur Scoville developed the Scoville Scale in 1912 during his time working the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company. The scale itself measured “piquancy,” which is a more clinical term for the near universal human experience of spiciness.
Image credit: Jenn Vargas
For most people, creating a scale for measuring spiciness would be enough, but for Scoville, it was just one of many achievements. In 1895, he had published The Art of Compounding, a book that would go through at least eight editions and was a key pharmacological text through the 1960s. He also spent a period working at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences as a professor. By the end of the 1920s, he had earned the American Pharmaceutical Association’s Ebert prize and the Remington Honor medal. He was also awarded an honorary Ph.D. in the sciences from Columbia University.
But today, we remember Scoville for his ground breaking work on the Scoville Scale, which is now more than 100 years old. As happy as we are to see that Google shares our love of spice , we figured it’d be fun to look back at Spiceworks’ own adoption of the Scoville Scale. With that in mind, we talked to @tabrez , one of the original minds behind tying community engagement with “pepper levels.”
(The first question and answer come from our recent interview with Tabrez for Spiceworks’ 10-year anniversary, where we discussed Spiceworks’ early days, his experience as the first employee, and what the future of Spiceworks looks like.)
The point system with different pepper levels and the like – I’ve heard you had a hand in creating that. Is that true?
[Laughter] Well, I might have. We originally had a system where you’d see under someone’s avatar how many times they had posted. But early on, we had a problem. We always wanted to make Spiceworks fun and had introduced this idea of badges, where you took some action and got a badge. But those didn’t capture a proper summation of the things you had done. We wanted to show people who was a more established member and who wasn’t and badges didn’t do it – a post count didn’t either. Between the best answers, helpful posts, and total number of posts someone had contributed, it just got too busy to display or understand in a fast way.
So we said, “What if everything contributes to points and the total number of points contribute to levels so that, at a glance, you can determine how established someone is in the community?” To keep with our company’s name, we decided to go use the Scoville System – because, why not?
How did the Community react to the introduction of a pepper level system?
Positively! It stayed with our theme – not the point system itself, but the pepper levels. It was all about going from a mild pepper to a really spicy pepper. I will say we struggled with what the highest level pepper would be. It seems like there’s always a new, even spicier pepper. We ended up deciding that the molecule pure capsaicin would be a safe bet because it is the actual unit of spice. Anything that comes up after that is going to be measured by how many pure capsaicin molecules exist in it. So, by definition, pure capsaicin is the unit of spice – you can’t get any spicier than that.
We still occasionally get requests for higher pepper levels, but that at least tells us what the upper limit is.
I’ve heard that you removed spice-ups at one point – how did that go over?
Really poorly [laughter]. We tried to change it over at one point to something similar to other platforms with pluses and minuses, and then there was a revolt where people said, “Bring the peppers back!” This was around 2007-2008. Needless to say, we brought the peppers back.
And a few fun facts about peppers …
- The capsaicin molecule has been found to be an effective pain relief medication, both as a topical cream and as something you ingest. According to Livestrong , “Topical ointments and creams containing capsaicin are helpful in relieving pain from many different conditions, including arthritis, fibromyalgia, nerve pain, and lower back pain.”
- Eating spicy foods has been linked to weight loss, as the capsaicin molecule “has been shown to boost metabolism as well as suppress appetite,” according to WebMD . (Personally, I’m curious whether we really needed science to tell us that eating a nuclear pepper kills our appetite – I don’t know about you, but when I’m crying, sweating, and convinced my whole being is melting, I’m not looking to eat more food.)
- Despite the fact that there are literally thousands of types of peppers, Mental Floss says that the “ones you know are all from the same species … [and] they’ve been domesticated for a long time.” The earliest known chili pepper seeds were found in ancient cooking tools in Peru and Mexico and are thought to be 6,000 years old.
- Some peppers are so hot, they can burn through gloves. The Trinidad Moruga Scorpion is one of them. Here’s a video of someone eating one on YouTube (because Internet fame).
Now for a little bit of fun: What’s the spiciest pepper you’ve ever eaten?
