about 100 years ago a man named wilbur scoville worked pharmaceutical company. he thought he could rate the spiciness of things by measuring how the spicy things reacted with chemicals in a lab setting but was unpredictable and unprecise. more predictable and more precise turns out was this. mr. scoville found out the human tongue was sensitive enough to detect the substance that gives us spiciness at concentrations way below any test you could cook up in a lab. the thing that gives us the spicy sensation is called capsaicin and dissolved in alcohol. wilbur scoville soaked spicy things in alcohol overnight to draw the capsaicin out of them so the spiciness would be in thç alcohol solution. to that he'd add sweetened