page_title: Helen (unit)
section_title: Origin
hierarchical_section_title: Helen (unit) / Origin
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Hélène
context_page_description: A helen is a humorous unit of measurement based on the concept that Helen of Troy, from the Iliad, had a "face that launched a thousand ships". The helen is thus used to measure quantities of beauty in terms of the theoretical action that could be accomplished by the wielder of such beauty.
context_section_description: 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 launched 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.
  According to The Rebel Angels, a 1981 novel by Robertson Davies, this system was invented by Cambridge mathematician W.A.H. Rushton. In his 1992 collection of jokes and limericks, Isaac Asimov claimed to have invented the term in the 1940s as a graduate student. In a 1958 letter to the New Scientist, R.C. Winton proposes the millihelen as the amount of beauty required to launch one ship. In response, P. Lockwood noted that the unit had been independently proposed by Edgar J. Westbury and extended by the pair to negative values, where −1 millihelen was the amount of ugliness required to sink a battleship.
caption: Helen leaving for Troy with Paris, as depicted by Guido Reni
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