Wilbur Scoville

Who was Wilbur Scoville?

Wilbur Lincoln Scoville was an American pharmacist and is best known for his creation of "The Scoville Organoleptic Test", now standardized as the Scoville scale. He devised the test and scale in 1912 while working at the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company to measure piquancy, or "hotness", of various chile peppers. Wilbur was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut on January 22. He married Cora B. Upham on September 1, 1891 in Wollaston. He had two children, Amy Augusta, born August 21, 1892 and Ruth Upham, born October 21, 1897.

In 1922, Scoville won the Ebert prize from the American Pharmaceutical Association and in 1929 he received the Remington Honor Medal. Scoville also received an honorary Doctor of Science from Columbia University in 1929.

Scoville wrote The Art of Compounding, which was first published in 1895 and has gone through at least 8 editions. The book was used as a pharmacological reference up until the 1960s. Scoville also wrote Extract and Perfumes, which contained hundreds of formulations.

He won the following awards from the American Pharmaceutical Association:

⁕1922 – The Ebert Prize, given to "...recognize the author of the best report of original investigation of a medicinal substance..."