Helen (unit)

The classic reference to Helen's beauty is Christopher 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?

[3] 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.

[4] The earliest known print citation is found in Punch magazine dated June 23, 1954 and attributed to an unnamed "professor of natural philosophy".

The "system" has been expanded by some writers, such as conceiving of negative values as measures of the ugliness required to beach a thousand ships.

Writing a humorous article about the concept, David Goines considered a range of metric prefixes to the unit, ranging from the attohelen (ah) which could merely "light up a Lucky while strolling past a shipyard", to the terahelen (Th) able to "launch the equivalent of one quadrillion Greek warships and make serious inroads on the welfare of the galaxy".