Who is Wilbur Scoville?

Wilbur Lincoln Scoville was a pharmacist that made his last name famous by his creation
of “The Scoville Organoleptic Test”
otherwise known as the Scoville scale. In Scoville’s method a specific amount of the peppers heat source,
capsaicin oil, is added to increasingly larger amounts of sugar-water until a small group of tasters can’t
detect the heat. How would you like that job?

Wilbur Scoville lived from 1865-1942. He’s famous mostly for his heat scale work at Park Davis, a Detroit-based
pharmaceutical company, where he devised a heat scale for peppers. However Scoville was also a pharmacist, a research scientist and a notable author.
His book The Art of Compounding was published in 1895 and was used for nearly 70 years as
the definitive reference for pharmacology. He also authored a lesser know work entitled Extracts and Perfumes.
Some of his other works in his field earned him awards from the American Pharmaceutical Association.