Fahrenheit(F)

It was named after the German physicist Daniel Gabriel .

He based his scale on three reference points of . In his initial scale (which is not the final Fahrenheit scale), the zero point is determined by placing the in brine (mixture of ice, water and salt). This is a frigorific mixture which stabilizes its temperature automatically: that stable temperature was defined as 0 °F (-17.78 °C). A mixture of ice and water also stabilizes, either freezing or melting at 32 °F. The second point, 100 degrees, was the horse body temperature, said at the time to be more stable than that of a human. The third point, 96 degrees, was approximately the human body temperature, then called "blood-heat."

According to a letter Fahrenheit wrote to his friend Herman Boerhaave, his scale was built on the work of Ole Rømer, whom he had met earlier. In Rømer’s scale, brine freezes at 0 degrees, ice melts at 7.5 degrees, body temperature is 22.5, and water boils at 60 degrees. Fahrenheit multiplied each value by four in order to eliminate fractions and increase the granularity of the scale. He then re-calibrated his scale using the melting point of ice and normal human body temperature (which were at 30 and 90 degrees); he adjusted the scale so that the melting point of ice would be 32 degrees and body temperature 96 degrees, so that 64 intervals would separate the two, allowing him to mark degree lines on his instruments by simply bisecting the interval six times (since 64 is 2 to the sixth power).

Fahrenheit observed, somewhat incorrectly, that water boils at about 212 degrees using this scale. Later, other scientists decided to redefine the degree slightly to make the freezing point exactly 32°F, and the boiling point exactly 212°F or 180 degrees higher. It is for this reason that normal human body temperature is approximately 98° (oral temperature) on the revised scale (whereas it was 90° on Fahrenheit's multiplication of Rømer, and 96° on his original scale)

Celcius or centigrade

In 1742 Swedish astronomer Anders originally created a "reversed" version of the modern Celsius temperature scale whereby zero represented the boiling point of water and one hundred represented the freezing point of water. In his paper Observations of two persistent degrees on a thermometer, he recounted his experiments showing that the melting point of ice is essentially unaffected by pressure. He also determined with remarkable precision how the boiling point of water varied as a function of atmospheric pressure. He proposed that the zero point of his temperature scale, being the boiling point, would be calibrated at the mean barometric pressure at mean sea level. This pressure is known as one standard atmosphere. The BIPM's 10th General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM) later defined one standard atmosphere to equal precisely 1013250dynes per square centimeter (101.325kPa).[3] In 1744, coincident with the death of Anders Celsius, the Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707– 1778) reversed[4] Celsius's scale upon receipt of his first thermometer featuring a scale where zero represented the melting point of ice and 100 represented the boiling point. His custom-made "linnaeus-thermometer", for use in his greenhouses, was made by Daniel Ekström, 's leading maker of scientific instruments at the time and whose workshop was located in the basement of the observatory. As often happened in this age before modern communications, numerous physicists, scientists, and instrument makers are credited with having independently developed this same scale;[5] among them were Pehr Elvius, the secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (which had an instrument workshop) and with whom Linnaeus had been corresponding; Christian of Lyons; Daniel Ekström, the instrument maker; and Mårten Strömer (1707–1770) who had studied under Anders Celsius

The first known document reporting in this modern "forward" Celsius scale is the paper Hortus Upsaliensis dated 16 December 1745 that Linnaeus wrote to a student of his, Samuel Nauclér. In it, Linnaeus recounted the temperatures inside the orangery at the Botanical Garden of University:

"... since the caldarium (the hot part of the greenhouse) by the angle of the windows, merely from the rays of the sun, obtains such heat that the thermometer often reaches 30 degrees, although the keen gardener usually takes care not to let it rise to more than 20 to 25 degrees, and in winter not under 15 degrees ..."

Kelvin

In 1848 Lord (William Thomson), wrote in his paper, On an Absolute Thermometric Scale, of the need for a scale whereby "infinite cold" (absolute zero) was the scale’s null point, and which used the degree Celsius for its unit increment. Thomson calculated that absolute zero was equivalent to −273 °C on the air of the time. This absolute scale is known today as the Kelvin thermodynamic temperature scale. Thomson’s value of "−273" was the reciprocal of 0.00366—the accepted expansion coefficient of gas per degree Celsius relative to the ice point, giving a remarkable consistency to the currently accepted value.

In 1954,Resolution 3 of the 10th CGPM gave the Kelvin scale its modern definition by designating the triple point of water as its second defining point and assigned its temperature to exactly 273.16 .[2] In 1967/1968, Resolution 3 of the 13th CGPM renamed the unit increment of thermodynamic temperature "kelvin", symbol K, replacing "degree absolute", symbol °K. Furthermore, feeling it useful to more explicitly define the magnitude of the unit increment, the 13th CGPM also held in Resolution 4 that "The kelvin, unit of thermodynamic temperature, is equal to the fraction 1/273.16 of the thermodynamic temperature of the triple point of water. In 2005, The Com ité International des Poids et Mesures (CIPM), a committee of the CGPM, affirmed that for the purposes of delineating the temperature of the triple point of water, the definition of the Kelvin thermodynamic temperature scale would refer to water having an isotopic composition specified as VSMOW.