The Fahrenheit degree ( represented as ºF ) is named after the glassblower, physicist and engineer Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit . Born in 1686 in Gdansk, in present-day Poland, he dedicated himself to traveling throughout Europe after the death of his parents and ended up settling in the Dutch city of Amsterdam . There, at the beginning of the 18th century, he began to work on the invention of a thermometer that used liquids other than water or alcohol to measure temperature. For his new version of the thermometer he needed an element whose thermal expansion was wide and uniform, which would not adhere to the glass that contained it, which would remain in a liquid state over a wide range of temperatures and which was easy to see by users. He finally decided to use mercury and in 1714 he invented his own thermometer. With the aim of replacing the Rømer scale , in force at that time, the scientist decided to design his own scale to apply to his thermometers, which he would publish in the Acta Editorum that same year.
To design his scale, Fahrenheit started from two fixed reference points and later added two others based on the freezing and boiling temperatures of water. The first point he placed on his thermometer was 0ºF , this being the lowest temperature of the harsh winter of 1709 and which he achieved with a mixture of ammonium salt, ice and liquid water . The second point was established with the body temperature of a healthy person (his wife), which at that time was considered a constant. Although at first he assigned the graduation to 24ºF , the degrees on his scale were too large and he ended up dividing them into four parts and moving that second reference to 96ºF . With these two established values, the rest of the scale was composed, giving the water freezing temperature 32ºF and the boiling temperature 212ºF .
This measure had a great extension worldwide, but it was losing importance when the French Revolution established that the degree Celsius ( symbol ºC ) should be considered as a standard unit for measuring temperature . In 1742, the Swedish physicist and astronomer Anders Celsius proposed a new scale that established that 100º was equivalent to the freezing temperature of water at sea level and 0º would be for the boiling temperature under the same pressure conditions. It would not be until a few years later that the French Jean-Pierre Christin would reverse this proposal so that it had a more logical order and that it still exists today. Currently, the International System establishes that the standard measure of temperature is the degree Celsius and the Fahrenheit has been practically reduced to the United States, Bahamas, Belize and the Cayman Islands .
As a curiosity, the title of the dystopian novel ‘ Fahrenheit 451 ‘ by Ray Bradbury refers to the temperature of this scale in which paper burns . In it, a hopeless future is narrated in which an authoritarian government has prohibited the reading of any book and the fire department is dedicated to burning them .
