To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. 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 centigrade scale was introduced in and remained the primary scale of temperature until Since the "grade" was in use as a unit including the "centigrade" , a new name was chosen for the temperature scale: Celsius. A degree Celsius or a Kelvin is what you get when divide the thermodynamic range between absolute zero and the triple point of a specific type of water into There is a 0. The temperature scale created by Anders Celsius in was actually the reverse of the modern Celsius scale.
Celsius' original scale had water boil at 0 degrees and freeze at degrees. Jean-Pierre Christin independently proposed at a temperature scale with zero at the freezing point of water and was the boiling point Celsius' original scale was reversed by Carolus Linnaeus in , the year in which Celsius died. When the scale was extended from 0 to degrees for temperature, centigrade was more properly hectograde.
The public was largely unaffected by the confusion. Even though the degree Celsius was adopted by international committees in , weather forecasts issued by the BBC continued to use degrees centigrade until February ! Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data.
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