Adrian Jadic asked in USMA 9252
>Does anyone know what is the story behind this capitalization?
>I know that the SI tolerates the use of capital L for liter but I see more
>and more attempts to use capital letters for metric abbreviations in the US.
>Too many packages display the milliliter as a megaliter; the sport events
>are in KM rather than km (that is when they are not just in K).
>
>In SI, capitals are used only for units that represent a proper name (Joule,
>Ampere, Hertz etc.). Is there an objective reason for using L instead of l
>in North America?
The reason for using L as the symbol for litre is simple; it is because
there is very little visual difference between one "1" and litre "l". For
example, does 5.3l mean 5.3 litres or pure number 5.31? Note that in UK
the common practice is to omit the space between the last digit of a number
and the unit symbol. I believe that the practice of using L as the symbol
for litre originated in Australia and was picked up by USA and Canada. The
16th Conf�rence g�n�rale des poids et mesures, 1979,
"*decides*, as an exception, to adopt the two symbols l and L as symbols to
be used for the litre,
"*considering* further that in the future only one of these two symbols
should be retained,
"*invites* the CIPM to follow the development of the use of these two
symbols and to give the 18th CGPM its opinion as to the possibility of
suppressing one of them."
Until now the CIPM has not reached a decision on this matter.
