Google doodle honours Wilbur Scoville, inventor of the pepper heat scale

Google is known to educate people as well as celebrate inventors and also inventions that have significance in our day to day lives via its doodles. Today’s doodle by doodler Olivia Huynh will remind you about the tongue-gurning, tear inducing qualities of peppers long before Columbus reached the Americas.

The doodle is in honour of Wilbur Lincoln Scoville’s 151st birthday who invented the way to measure pepper’s heat. In his book, The Art of Compounding, he has mentioned milk as an antidote for pepper heat. He is also remembered for the organoleptic test that uses human testers to measure pungency in peppers. “Spiciness is somewhat of a universal, comical experience, which I think opened the door for us to do something we usually might not be able to, like a fighting game. I started making storyboards for how the game could unfold while engineers worked on building prototypes. Then I started sketching and making draft art to put in the prototype, so we could see what the experience would be like in interactive form,” Huynh said. It is an interactive doodle that lets you have some fun. Once you click on the fiery play button, the interactive game will help you learn heat properties of bell pepper, jalapeno pepper and cayenne pepper. You need to throw ice-cream on the peppers to neutralise them. As the game proceeds, it gets difficult to use the slider and aim the ice-cream at the pepper. You will also see Wilbur Lincoln Scoville with several types of peppers in the background.