Daniel Fahrenheit

In my boredom this summer, it was suggest by JSC that I do some kinda research into something that interested me. An attempt to get me off the web and into a library no doubt (and there would’ve been had she not said, “It’ll get you off the web and into a library…”)

Anyway, Daniel Fahrenheit. The Fahrenheit temperature system is one I’ve never understood. When people spoke of it getting to 100 in July, part of me was thinking that water would instantly boil. And then I remembered about Fahrenheit.

It’s not something I’ve been brought up with. I don’t have an understanding of it, the numbers don’t mean anything to me. Much like pounds and ounces are of little significance to me.

Born in 1686, spending most of his life in Amsterdam, he lived around the same time as Anders Celsius (the guy whose scale means more to me) – but there is no evidence to say they met.

Fahrenheit was fascinated by scientific instruments and wandered around Europe learning from scientists in different cities. In Copenhagen he met a guy called Olaus Roemer, a Danish astronomer who had invented his own thermometer. Roemer’s used alcohol to measure temperatures, specifically wine, using two main points of reference: 60 degrees was the temperature of boiling water and, somewhat bizarrely, 7 and a half degrees as the temperature of melting ice.

Fahrenheit took Roemer’s thermometer and modified it because he was no fan of “inconvenient and awkward fractions,” according to his letters. He used mercury rather than wine and established three fixed points on his thermometer.

This is the part that I find absurd.

For zero on his scale, he chose the temperature of an equal ice-salt mixture. For 30, he chose the freezing point of water, and 90 was supposed to be the human‘s normal body temperature.

There’s so much wrong with that… firstly, Fahrenheit got his measurements wrong. The freezing point of water is 32 degrees and the average human body temperature is 98.6. So he’s an inaccurate moron. Secondly, what’s wrong with using zero as the freeing point of water, why use 30? Oh, wait, he’s used zero for an equal ice-salt mixture. What the…? Why ice and salt? Why not ice and orange juice?

It’s just a bad idea. And for some people, Americans in particular, they’re stuck with it.

I’m almost glad it means nothing to me.

Anders Celsius by the way would have told you that your cup of coffee would have measured zero degrees by his original scale, as zero represented the boiling point of water and 100 was the temperature at which water froze…

Celsius’ scale doesn’t make intuitive sense now, and it apparently didn’t when he developed it. After he died, his scale was sneakily inverted to the style we now know it as, with zero representing the freezing point of water at standard atmospheric pressure and 100 the boiling point.