In Linus Pauling's book, "General Chemistry", in one of the annotations in the first chapter, he writes the following about the word "joule": " Usually pronounced to rhyme with howl." I have not found any evidence to support this claim as every dictionary and reference I have found so far claims that joule is pronounced like "jewel". Is there any evidence to support Linus Pauling's pronunciation of joule as " Jowl" or was it some sort of jestful annotation used to add humor to his otherwise strictly factual book?
Edit: At the request of user @sumelic, I will append my question with another one. Was "Jowl" the colloquially accepted pronunciation in Linus Pauling's time, or was this the common pronunciation only in the scientific community of Pauling's time? Perhaps even a brief history of the etymology of joule might help shed light on this strange discrepancy in pronunciation.
Best Answer
A 1943 letter to the editor of the journal Nature suggests that the anglicized pronunciation of joule was accepted not only by many in the public, but by authorities for some time:
Kenyon & Scott's A Pronouncing Dictionary of American English, published a few years later, provides multiple pronunciations:
As Pauling was born in 1901, it seems plausible that he learned to pronounce joule to rhyme with jowl, and that this pronunciation would have been accepted in some quarters— if not by all. People tend to pronounce names and terms as they learn then, without revisiting them, and that is true of scientists as much as anyone else.
A 2008 paper by JR Schwyter, Setting a standard: Early BBC language policy and the Advisory Committee on Spoken English, reports that "the Committee received 27 letters relating to the pronunciation of the last name Joule, as in James Prescott Joule, the scientist (19 January 1933)… In the light of such correspondence, the Committee (30 November 1933) decided on the pronunciation… ‘JOOL’*.
Over the course of the twentieth century, it seems the "jewel" pronunciation came to predominate. Perhaps the BBC Radio influence helped. Perhaps it rose because it was the more prevalent American pronunciation (per Webster's as quoted above), and American physicists rose in both numbers and preeminence, especially in the nuclear age. Perhaps it is because, related to this, the American postwar tendency is not to anglicize pronunciations, and the fact that Joule was an Englishman may be lost on the public. It is hard to attribute shifts in pronunciation to any one cause or moment in history.
The current OED entry notes
For what it's worth, this was the pronunciation given in its first edition—
— immediately after the entry for Joul(e, obs. form of JOWL.