Gabriel Fahrenheit |
 Dave Thurlow, Host |
In 1717 a guy by the name of Gabriel Fahrenheit set out to improve one of Galileo's many inventions, the thermometer, back then called a thermoscope. Fahrenheit felt that the 50 year old instrument might better serve peoples needs if it had a scale, you know, numbers. I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory in North Conway New Hampshire and this is The Weather Notebook.
Earlier thermometers had no standard scale, and no standard liquid inside. Some used water, most used alcohol. Fahrenheit chose mercury. And to make the thermoscope a true thermometer all he had to do was apply some kind of scale. You see a thermoscope, just went up and down, telling folks that the temperature was rising or falling, but not how much.
Fahrenheit decided that the low point of the scale should be set at the coldest winter temperature in his home town of Amsterdam. He called this zero. The high point would be the temperature of the human body, the male human body that it is because it was then believed that women had much lower body temperatures. But in spite of his physiological misunderstandings, Fahrenheit charged forward, took his temperature and marked that point of mercury expansion to be 100 degrees. Now realize that any number could be used on the scale, six , a million, 746.. anything. The newly created thermometer could now be used to actually measure. So on the Fahrenheit scale the freezing point of water just happens to be 32 and the boiling point - aw you know what it is. And what did Fahrenheit get for all this work? Well the first thing was a cold. Remember his body temperature was 100 and further study found normal body temperature to be 98.6 Fahrenheit.
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