Virtually every country on earth aside from the United States measures temperature in Celsius. This makes sense; Celsius is a reasonable scale that assigns freezing and boiling points of water with round numbers, zero and In Fahrenheit, those are, incomprehensibly, 32 and This isn't just an aesthetic issue.
America's stubborn unwillingness to get rid of Fahrenheit temperatures is part of its generally dumb refusal to change over to the metric system, which has real-world consequences. Why does the United States have such an antiquated system of measurement? You can blame two of history's all-time greatest villains: British colonialism and Congress.
Back in the early 18th century, the Fahrenheit measurement system was actually pretty useful. As a young man, Fahrenheit became obsessed with thermometers.
This may seem weird, but measuring temperature was a big problem at the time. No one had really invented a consistent, reliable way to measure temperature objectively. As an early inventor of the thermometer as we know it, Fahrenheit naturally had to put something on them to mark out different temperatures. The scale he used became what we now call Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit set zero at the lowest temperature he could get a water and salt mixture to reach. He then used a very slightly incorrect measurement of the average human body temperature, 96 degrees, as the second fixed point in the system.
The resulting schema set the boiling point of water at degrees, and the freezing point at 32 degrees. In , Fahrenheit was inducted into the British Royal Society, at the time a preeminent Western scientific organization, and his system caught on in the British Empire. As Britain conquered huge chunks of the globe in the 18th and 19th centuries, it brought the Fahrenheit system and some other peculiar Imperial measurements, such as feet and ounces along with it. 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.
Fahrenheit's thermometer, though, was much more accurate. He used the same freezing and boiling reference points as Roemer's scale — referred to in his writings as "Extream Cold" and "Extream Hott" — but roughly multiplied the scale by four to divide each marker on the scale into finer increments.
On Fahrenheit's scale, wrote Grigull, the four reference points were: 0 at the combined freezing temperature of brine , 30 the freezing point of regular water , 90 body temperature and the boiling point of water. Related: Supernovas heat atoms to hundreds of millions of degrees Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit published a paper describing his scale in the journal Philosophical Transactions in Grigull wrote "His fellowship of the Royal Society resulted in his thermometer, and thereby his scale, receiving particular acceptance in England and consequently later also in North America and the British Empire.
Related: The world's oceans are heating up at an accelerated rate. However, only a few countries today still use Fahrenheit to measure temperature.
The United States and its territories, along with the Bahamas, Palau, Belize, the Cayman Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, have stuck with the temperature scale, despite the rest of the world moving to the Celsius scale, according to the online geography resource World Atlas.
After Fahrenheit's death in , the Fahrenheit scale was recalibrated to make it slightly more accurate. The exact freezing and boiling points of plain water, minus the salt, were marked at 32 and degrees Fahrenheit, respectively. Normal human body temperature was marked at Read more: Has the average human body temperature changed? Celsius was a Swedish astronomer and is credited with discovering the connection between the aurora borealis , also known as the Northern Lights, and the Earth's magnetic field , as well as a method for determining the brightness of stars , according to the U.
National High Magnetic Field Laboratory. In a proposal to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in , Celsius proposed a scale based on two fixed points: 0 the boiling point of water and the freezing point of water. Following Celsius' death in , the famous Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus proposed that the fixed points be switched, with 0 indicating the freezing point of water and its boiling point, according to The Legacy of Anders Celsius in JSTOR Daily, a digital library.
The scale has also been extended to include negative numbers. Celsius initially called his scale "Centigrade" from the Latin for one hundred "centi" degrees "grade" , because there were points between water freezing and boiling. In , an international conference on weights and measures Conference General des Poids et Measures changed the name to "Celsius" in honor of Anders Celsius, according to the U.
Related: As the Paris Agreement aims to cut emissions, we have already blown past warming targets. The Celsius scale has degrees between water boiling and freezing, while Fahrenheit has degrees.
Where's the logic in that? But from what books I've read, I can't tell you why Fahrenheit or the others used to divide the temperature scale in that way. My intuition tells me that it might have something to do with the degrees of the circle. The difference between and 32 is Like setting the temperatures at opposite sides of the diameter. I don't know, I'm shotting in the dark right now.
Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Community Bot 1. Kyle Kanos Kyle Kanos It is not what I am asking. I will make an edit to make my question more clear. I thought you asked what is the significance of these numbers and how people got to them. By that scale, other reproducible temperatures such as the freezing point of pure water occured at inconvenient values, so the scale was adjusted, producing the scale we have today.
Although it is an account of the origin, it doesn't explain the evolution to the scale as we know it today. David David 21 1 1 bronze badge. Featured on Meta. Now live: A fully responsive profile.
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