Wilbur Scoville was first published in 1895 and has gone through at least 8 editions. The book was used as a pharmacological reference up until the 1960s. Scoville also wrote "Extracts and Perfumes", which contained hundreds of formulations. For a time he was a professor at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. In 1912, he devised the test and scale known as the "Scoville Organoleptic Test" while working at the Parke-Davis pharmaceutical company. It measured piquancy, or "spiciness", of various chili peppers. It is now standardized as the Scoville scale. In 1922, Scoville won the Ebert prize from the American
Scoville Library the Scoville Memorial Library collection, making the library the first publicly supported free town library in the United States. In the early 1890s, Jonathan Scoville, another Salisbury native, left $12,000 in his will for a library building. This bequest, together with contributions from other Scoville family members, financed the construction of a gray granite building, built from native stone quarried near Lion's Head Road. Miss Grace Scoville donated a tower clock, which continues to chime the quarter hours with four, eight, twelve, and sixteen notes from Parsifal. The original building was designed to serve the town as its library and