ABSTRACT
Probably no unit is more widely used in chemistry than the litre, yet relatively little is known about the eighteenth-century maker of wine bottles, Claude Émile Jean-Baptiste Litre. He first proposed the system of specifying volumes in terms of the mass of liquid a container would hold. He was the pre-eminent manufacturer of chemical glassware of his day—the first to produce precision graduated cylinders and the inventor of the burette. His graduated cylinders varied in internal diameter by less than 0.1% of their length, and were graduated into hundredths—or even thousandths—of their volume.
