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 classic reference to Helen’s beauty is Marlowe’s lines from the 1592 play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. According to The Rebel Angels, a 1981 novel by Robertson Davies, this system was invented by Cambridge mathematician W. A. Rushton.
About Helen (unit) in brief
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 classic reference to Helen’s beauty is Marlowe’s lines from the 1592 play The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus. 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. Isaac Asimov claimed to have invented the term in the 1940s as a graduate student.
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This page is based on the article Helen (unit) published in Wikipedia (as of Nov. 26, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
