i’ve never understood how people imagine an easier scale to calibrate than celsius, what is easier than freezing and boiling water??
Human body temperature isn’t an easy calibration point, are you gonna shove it up your ass to calibrate it, or what?
i’ve never understood how people imagine an easier scale to calibrate than celsius, what is easier than freezing and boiling water??
Human body temperature isn’t an easy calibration point, are you gonna shove it up your ass to calibrate it, or what?
ricecake@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
Well, first off he wasn’t actually doing it after Celsius existed as a temperature scale. He made it a solid 18 years beforehand.
Second, there are some issues. Specifically, ice freezes at 0, but it doesn’t stop getting colder. So if you have a bit of ice, that doesn’t tell you the temperature, just that it’s below a threshold. Boiling is more convenient because liquid water can’t get above 100, but you do have to consider side pressure.
Fahrenheit used brine because as it freezes it forces salt out of the ice, making it more resistant to freezing. It self stabilizes its temperature, which is immensely handy.
None of the people designing their scales envisioned that using the basic reference points for common calibration would be a thing. Just like how we don’t calibrate them with brine, ice, steam or butts today, instead relying on how we marked down how electrical resistance changes as a function of temperature and then calibrated reference numbers to get the scale right.
It’s important to remember that the people in the past were largely not stupid, they simply hadn’t found out something we take for granted or they had priorities that we don’t.