The Anglophone countries finally caved in the second half of the 20th century. The UK itself began metrication, the process of switching all measurements to the metric system, in It still hasn't fully completed metrication, but the modern UK is an overwhelmingly metric country. Virtually every other former British colony switched over as well.
Some did so before even the UK e. These changes, all around the same time, prompted the US to consider going metric itself. It made sense to switch over, both because the metric system is more intuitive and because adopting the same system as other countries would make scientific cooperation much easier. Congress passed a law, the Metric Conversion Act, that was theoretically supposed to begin the process of metrication.
It set up a Metric Board to supervise the transition. The law crashed and burned. Because it made metrication voluntary , rather than mandatory, the public had a major say in the matter. And lots of people didn't want to have to learn new systems for temperatures or weights. Organized labor fought it as well, according to Zengerle, so workers wouldn't have to retrain to learn the new measures.
President Reagan dismantled the Metric Board in , its work in tatters. Congress's dumb implementation of the law ensured that America would keep measuring temperature in Fahrenheit. Today, the US is virtually alone in the world in staying off the metric system, joined only by Burma and Liberia Burma announced its intent to metricate in The bizarre measurements commonly used in the US, including Fahrenheit, are bad for its scientific establishment, its kids, and probably its businesses.
Susannah Locke lays out the case for Celsius and the rest of the metric system very persuasively, but here's a brief recap. The simpler metric scales make basic calculations easier and thus less error-prone. American companies incur extra costs by producing two sets of products, one for the US and one for the metric using world. American parents and caregivers are more likely to screw up conversion rates when they give out medicine, sending some children, who are more susceptible to overdoses, to the hospital.
Further, American students have to be trained on two sets of measurements, making basic science education even more difficult. So while Daniel Fahrenheit did the world a solid by inventing a reliable thermometer, his system for measuring temperatures has seen its day. America, it's time to adopt Celsius — and the rest of the metric system. Trouble is, the original Celsius scale had for freezing, 0 for boiling.
In other words, it was upside-down. These thermometer guys, what gets into them? Must be too much mercury exposure. I have just the thing. At what temperature are the Fahrenheit and Celsius readings the same?
People will look at you with newfound respect when you reveal the astonishing answer: minus Cookie banner We use cookies and other tracking technologies to improve your browsing experience on our site, show personalized content and targeted ads, analyze site traffic, and understand where our audiences come from.
By choosing I Accept , you consent to our use of cookies and other tracking technologies. The Straight Dope homepage. Filed under:. On the Fahrenheit scale, why is 32 freezing and boiling? What do 0 and mean? By Cecil Adams Dec 15, The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates allegedly taught that the human hand could be used to judge the presence of fever in a person as early as B.
However, precise instruments to measure human body temperature were not developed until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In , the Polish-born Dutch physicist, inventor and scientific instrument maker Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit unveiled a mercury-based thermometer. Mercury , a liquid metal, expands and contracts based on the surrounding temperature When Fahrenheit placed mercury in a closed tube marked with a numbered scale, he saw the mercury rise and fall when it was exposed to different temperatures.
According to The Royal Society in the United Kingdom, this was the world's first known practical, accurate thermometer. Fahrenheit had based his invention on Danish scientist Ole Roemer's alcohol-based thermometer. Roemer labeled his temperature scale with zero marked at the temperature where brine salt water froze and 60 as the point at which water boiled, wrote Ulrich Grigull, the late director of the Institute for Thermodynamics at the Technical University of Munich in Germany , in a conference presentation.
Ice melted at 7. Related: What if temperature determined a baby's sex? Fahrenheit's thermometer, though, was much more accurate. He used the same freezing and boiling reference points as Roemer's scale — referred to in his writings as "Extream Cold" and "Extream Hott" — but roughly multiplied the scale by four to divide each marker on the scale into finer increments.
On Fahrenheit's scale, wrote Grigull, the four reference points were: 0 at the combined freezing temperature of brine , 30 the freezing point of regular water , 90 body temperature and the boiling point of water. Related: Supernovas heat atoms to hundreds of millions of degrees Fahrenheit. Fahrenheit published a paper describing his scale in the journal Philosophical Transactions in Grigull wrote "His fellowship of the Royal Society resulted in his thermometer, and thereby his scale, receiving particular acceptance in England and consequently later also in North America and the British Empire.
Related: The world's oceans are heating up at an accelerated rate. However, only a few countries today still use Fahrenheit to measure temperature. The United States and its territories, along with the Bahamas, Palau, Belize, the Cayman Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, have stuck with the temperature scale, despite the rest of the world moving to the Celsius scale, according to the online geography resource World Atlas.
After Fahrenheit's death in , the Fahrenheit scale was recalibrated to make it slightly more accurate. The exact freezing and boiling points of plain water, minus the salt, were marked at 32 and degrees Fahrenheit, respectively. Normal human body temperature was marked at Read more: Has the average human body temperature changed?
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