Today in Technology History
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May 24
On May 24, 1686, Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit was born in the city of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland).
Fahrenheit moved to Amsterdam at age 15, where he became a builder of precision scientific instruments. He specialized in devices for measuring weather, and he is of course best known for his work on the thermometer.
Fahrenheit did not actually invent the thermometer. There is evidence that primitive thermometers were used several centuries before Christ, and some of history's greatest scientists (including Galileo and Newton) worked on thermometers in the century before Fahrenheit's birth.
Unlike previous thermometers, which contained mixtures of water and alcohol, Fahrenheit filled his thermometers with mercury. This meant they were more reliable and could measure much higher and lower temperatures.
Fahrenheit meticulously developed a scale to quantify temperature changes. He set as 0 degrees the lowest temperature he could achieve (a frozen mixture of salt and water). Despite rumors to the effect that he wanted body temperature to be 100 degrees on his scale, he actually wanted it to be 96 degrees for various reasons; it became 98.6 instead. Water freezes at 32 and boils at 212.
Although there were 30 competing systems of temperature gradation, Fahrenheit's became enormously popular because of the precision and trustworthiness of his thermometers.
The Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius, just a scant few years after Fahrenheit's 1736 death, developed the centigrade system of gradation where water freezes at 0 degrees and boils at 100. Most of the world has now adopted the Celsius system, although the U.S. is still firmly entrenched in the Fahrenheit system.
Related links:
Click here to read Fahrenheit's account of one of his experiments measuring temperatures.
Click here to read about the history of thermometers.
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