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From: lambert@mcvax.UUCP
Newsgroups: sci.misc
Subject: Re: metric system
Message-ID: <48@piring.cwi.nl>
Date: Sat, 15-Aug-87 10:04:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: piring.48
Posted: Sat Aug 15 10:04:31 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 16-Aug-87 09:43:14 EDT
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Distribution: sci.misc
Organization: CWI, Amsterdam
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) My high school text books had the same story, but Robert Fahrenheit was
) English.  Anybody know the real story?

Who is Robert Fahrenheit?  The great-grandnephew of Daniel Gabriel
Fahrenheit and the inventor of the potrzebie temperature scale?

D.G. Fahrenheit was born in Danzig in 1686, moved to Amsterdam in 1717,
where he invented the mercury thermometer (until then he had used an
alcohol thermometer, invented by del Cimiento in 1660) and died in The
Hague in 1736 according to one source I have, in Danzig according to
another source, whereas all other sources currently available to me leave
the place of demise open.  (They all agree he died:-)

The zero point in his original system was *both* the temperature attained
by a mixture of snow and sal ammoniac (ammonium chloride) *and* the lowest
temperature observed in Danzig in the winter of 1709.  He was intelligent
enough to realize that the latter was not a conveniently usable
calibration point.  In his first revision of the system, published in 1717,
Fahrenheit (D.G.) defined the upper calibration point of bodily temperature
as 96 degrees.  In a second revision, published in 1724, he made the
significant step of using the freezing and boiling temperatures of water as
calibration points (32 and 212 degrees).

) (C) Copyright 1987 Laura Creighton - you may redistribute only if your 
)     recipients may.

Oh gosh, I really don't know how to check what the thousands (?) of
recipients of this article may or may not.

-- 

Lambert Meertens, CWI, Amsterdam; lambert@cwi.nl