Westbury and extended by the pair to negative values, where −1 millihelen was the amount of ugliness required to sink a battleship. In response, P. Lockwood noted that the unit had been independently proposed by Edgar J. Winton proposes the millihelen as the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. In a 1958 letter to the New Scientist, R.C. In his 1992 collection of jokes and limericks, Isaac Asimov claimed to have invented the term in the 1940s as a graduate student. The classic reference to Helen's beauty is Marlowe's lines from the 1592 play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus, "Was this the face that launch'd a thousand ships / And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?" In the tradition of humorous pseudounits, then, 1 millihelen is the amount of beauty needed to launch a single ship.Īccording to The Rebel Angels, a 1981 novel by Robertson Davies, this system was invented by Cambridge mathematician W.A.H. Helen leaving for Troy with Paris, as depicted by Guido Reni
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