What kind of thermometer(s) have you used this year?
1593
Galileo Galilei has done it again! The Italian inventor used the common knowledge that liquids expand when they are warm, and contract when they are cool — and took it one step further to develop the thermoscope. This was a test tube filled with water and glass bulbs, which rose and fell with the changing temps. Sorry, no data available on exactly how cold or hot it was, just that a change occurred.
Ah, now you can finally tell the temperature with a brand-new apparatus called the thermometer (using the brand-new system of measuring!). Daniel Fahrenheit (of the °F fame) included numbers on his test tube — with 32 degrees as the freezing point and 212 degrees as the boiling point. And he used mercury as the liquid instead of alcohol because mercury can measure temperatures. Wonder if Daniel knew that one day his last name would be a household word?!
If you find the numbers on the Fahrenheit scale to be quite confusing, so do most others! Thank you Anders Celsius for making a fix. On his scale, 0 is the point at which water freezes and 100 the point at which it boils. Most of the world uses the Celsius system… except for the good ol’ US of A.
Phew! Now mothers don’t have to rely on their hands to feel if their kids have temperature. Kudos to English physician Sir Thomas Allbutt for inventing the first practical thermometer for measuring body temps. It was six inches long and able to record the temperature in five minutes. I’m sure the lines at his practice were out the door. (Or not!)
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