When was fahrenheit created

He realized the trick wasn't using the coldness or hotness of a particular day or place, but finding materials that changed at certain temperatures. Isaac Newton had had the same idea a few years earlier, but he wasn't a thermometer-maker. His idea stayed in books. For seven years Fahrenheit worked out an alcohol thermometer scale based on three points.

He chose the freezing point of a certain salt-water mixture for zero. He used the freezing point of water for 32 degrees. And body temperature he called 96 degrees. Why the funny numbers? He originally used a twelve-point scale with zero, four, and twelve for those three benchmarks. Then he put eight gradations in each large division. That's how he got that strange 96 number -- it was eight times twelve.

Body temperature is actually a tad higher than 96, but it was close. Later, Fahrenheit made mercury thermometers that let him use the boiling point of water instead of human body temperature for the high mark. Fahrenheit was still only 28 when he startled the world by making a pair of thermometers that both gave the same readings.

No one had ever done that before. Fahrenheit became a standard temperature in much of the globe. The Anglophone world ended up being an outlier. By the midth century , most of the world adopted Celsius , the popular means of measuring temperature in the modern metric system. Celsius was invented in by Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius. Around , Celsius was integrated into the metric system — itself an outgrowth of the French revolution's desire to unify the country at the national level.

The metric system's simplicity and scientific utility helped spread it, and celsius, throughout the world. The Anglophone countries finally caved in the second half of the 20th century. The UK itself began metrication, the process of switching all measurements to the metric system, in It still hasn't fully completed metrication, but the modern UK is an overwhelmingly metric country. Virtually every other former British colony switched over as well. Some did so before even the UK e.

These changes, all around the same time, prompted the US to consider going metric itself. It made sense to switch over, both because the metric system is more intuitive and because adopting the same system as other countries would make scientific cooperation much easier. Congress passed a law, the Metric Conversion Act, that was theoretically supposed to begin the process of metrication. It set up a Metric Board to supervise the transition.

The law crashed and burned. Because it made metrication voluntary , rather than mandatory, the public had a major say in the matter. And lots of people didn't want to have to learn new systems for temperatures or weights. Organized labor fought it as well, according to Zengerle, so workers wouldn't have to retrain to learn the new measures. President Reagan dismantled the Metric Board in , its work in tatters.

Congress's dumb implementation of the law ensured that America would keep measuring temperature in Fahrenheit. Today, the US is virtually alone in the world in staying off the metric system, joined only by Burma and Liberia Burma announced its intent to metricate in The bizarre measurements commonly used in the US, including Fahrenheit, are bad for its scientific establishment, its kids, and probably its businesses.

Susannah Locke lays out the case for Celsius and the rest of the metric system very persuasively, but here's a brief recap. Anders Celsius was also a physicist, as well as an astronomer and mathematician.

Interested in atmospheric sciences, in Celsius published his finding that the freezing point of water was independent of latitude something previously debated ; he also developed a consistent method of calculating the boiling point of water as barometric pressure changes. Specifically, in the s, Linnaeus built an orangery a kind of conservatory originally erected to grow citrus fruits in Uppsala.

Well, to be pedantic, Celsius and centigrades are not exactly the same scale, although very similar at usual temperatures and relative to the precision of day to day thermometers, can be considered the same. Yet, the centigrade use the freezing point and boiling point of water as 0 and , while the Celsius scale use the triple point of water as 0. PouetPouet: Funny you should mention this. However, when I wrote it up, I felt the explanation of why not got a little eye-glazing and not terribly interesting beyond the base-fact.