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Rivalarrival@lemmy.today ⁨3⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

100 is the imprecise average body temperature of the developer

That’s a myth. It’s no more true than the myth that it was the body temperature of horses, or that the scale was designed to reflect how humans experience the weather. (It happens to reflect how humans experience the weather, but this was an incidental characteristic and not the purpose for which the scale was designed.)

The Fahrenheit scale starts to make sense when you realize he was a geometrists. It turns out that a base-10 system of angular measurement objectively sucks ass, so the developer wasn’t particularly interested in the number “100”, but in geometrically interesting numbers. He put 180 degrees between the freezing and boiling points of water. (212F - 32F = 180F)

After setting the “width” of his degree, he measured down to a repeatable origin point, which happened to be 32 of his degrees below the freezing point of water.

The calibration point wasn’t the “freezing point” of the “random brine mixture”. The brine was water, ice, and ammonium chloride, which together form a frigorific mixture due to the phase change of the water. As the mixture is cooled, it resists getting colder than 0F due to the phase change of the water to ice. As it is warmed, it resists getting warmer than 0F due to the phase change of ice to water. This makes it repeatable, in labs around the world. The stable temperature is the temperature of the brine liquid in which the ice is floating, not the frozen water.

And it wasn’t a “random” brine mixture: it was the coldest and most stable frigorific mixture known to the scientific community.

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