Dear Pat:
The only Lulu I ever heard of was the one from Honolulu. Unrelated, I presume.
(I could not resist.)
You say - kilojoule the only official unit? It would have had to be the joule,
not kilojoule, unless it suffered similar fate as the kilogram.
The calorie was "official," whatever that means, according to A dictionary of
Scientific Units as follows:
"The word calorie originated in France in 1787 when it was used to represent
the "matter of heat." The word 'calorimeter' [sic] was used by Lavoisier in
1780. The calorie received international recognition as the unit of heat in
1896 but it had been in use since 1880."
As to the joule, the joule was proposed by the British Association in 1885. It
was recognized by the IEC in 1889. In 1946 CIPM recommended its use as we know
it today - for all forms of energy - and the CGPM adopted that in 1948 with the
all killing note to use the joule "as far as possible" (in calorimetric
experiments). Like, who decides what's impossible? - anyone who does not like
the joule most likely. SI mercifully removed that escape route.
Stan Jakuba
----- Original Message -----
From: Pat Naughtin
To: U.S. Metric Association
Cc: U.S. Metric Association
Sent: 09 Jul 18, Saturday 22:55
Subject: [USMA:45428] Re: Names of old measuring methods
On 2009/07/18, at 10:22 AM, John M. Steele wrote:
I don't know who Lulu is, but in her defense, her calorie is closer to a
calorie than many calories are.
Dear John,
Here is a little background to Lulu Hunt-Peters in the context of energy
measurements. In this context it is interesting to note that Dr Lulu
Hunt-Peters has been highly successful at changing the world of food
measurement to her idiosyncratic and unscientific measuring word at the same
time as the entire world of metrology has clearly failed to promote their point
of view. Dr Hunt-Peters did not have government support, she did not have the
support of the scientific community, nor did she did not have any legal
precedence. Basically, all she had was the ability to write for women's
magazines, and with that talent she changed the entire world of measuring the
energy in food.
Think about the competition between the internationally recognised metric
unit for food energy, kilojoule, and some of the other common measuring words
such as, calories, Calories, gram calories, kilocalories, or kilogram calories.
Dr Hunt-Peters succeeded while the world of scientific metrology failed!
You can find an outline of Lulu Hunt Peters life at
http://calorielab.com/news/2005/09/16/lulu-hunt-peters-and-the-birth-of-the-modern-diet-book/
and a copy of her main book from http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/15069
Here is a summary of the history of food energy.
There has been only one official metric unit for measuring food energy since
1889 — kilojoules. For example, a slice of bread contains about 250 kilojoules
of food energy and a sweet biscuit has about 500 kilojoules of food energy. The
kilojoule had been accepted as the sole unit for energy internationally since
1889.
However in 1918, 29 years after the establishment of the kilojoule as an
international standard unit for measuring the energy in food, Dr Lulu Hunt
Peters popularised an alternative word, 'calorie', to describe food energy in
the USA. However, she avoided defining the concept of food energy by writing,
'… hereafter you are going to eat calories of food. Instead of saying one
slice of bread, or a piece of pie, you will say 100 calories of bread, 350
calories of pie.'
Food energy and measuring have been profoundly muddled ever since the
publication of the book, Diet and Health in 1918.
As a child, Lulu Hunt Peters was aware of her problem with body mass when she
wrote, '… that there is genuine mental suffering in being an obese child.' She
knew this from her own experience as a child and, as an adult, she reached a
body mass of 100 kilograms when the body mass of an average woman was close to
65 kg.
Dr Hunt Peters defined a calorie as the amount of heat needed to heat 4
pounds of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit. She based her definition on the German
research into dog digestion done by W. O. Atwater who was investigating the
best way to use dog droppings for tanning leather.
Many attempts were made later to define the word, calorie, in metric terms.
For example, the size of a calorie depends on the temperature at which it is
defined; technically on a scale of 32 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit there are 180
possible definitions for the word, calorie. But this only led to more confusion
as different groups then devise different definitions for the different ways
that a calorie might be spelled; one example is that a Calorie (with an upper
case C) is 1000 times larger than a calorie (with a lower case c). This is why
we have: calories, Calories, gram calories, kilocalories, kilogram calories,
and perhaps 20 or 30 other spelling varieties with potentially different
values. Like other old pre-metric measures there are now far too many different
calories (or Calories or kilocalories) that have many different names and
varying values.
The existence of these seemingly good choices (kilojoule accurate, the others
popular) means that the debate between them will continue for many generations,
with nutritionists and dieticians dithering between them. To a measurement
specialist there is only one choice, the kilojoule, but I suspect that women's
and diet magazines will continue dithering. You can only avoid dithering by
adopting a definite measurement policy for yourself or the group that you
represent.
When you write: 'her calorie is closer to a calorie than many calories are'
you are accepting the definition of one group, in one place, who have defined
the word calorie according to their own requirements. To the best of my
knowledge, no international authority has been able to define a 'universal
calorie. For example, BIPM (at
http://www1.bipm.org/en/si/si_brochure/chapter4/table10.html ) simply notes
that a number of different calories have been used in the past, they write:
i) Several "calories" have been in use:
a.. a calorie labelled "at 15 °C": 1 cal15 = 4.1855 J
(value adopted by the CIPM in 1950; PV, 1950, 22, 79-80);
a.. a calorie labelled "IT" (International Table): 1
calIT = 4.1868 J (5th International Conference on the Properties of Steam,
London, 1956);
a.. a calorie labelled "thermochemical": 1 calth =
4.184 J.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
Author of the forthcoming book, Metrication Leaders Guide.
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has helped
thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the modern metric
system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they now save thousands each
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