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Quick and easy version...

There are a number of temperature scales. America (and a few other countries) still uses “Farenheit”. The “Celsius” (formerly Centigrade) temperature system that is widely in use today, starts with 0 = freezing and 100 = boiling. This makes a lot of sense.

70% of the Earths surface is covered in water. 60% of human bodies is made of water. It seems like a very good reference point for measurement...

The word “Centigrade” is taken from Latin; Centum meaning 100 and Gradus meaning steps.

So, lets keep this simple! Some temperature gauges are cyclical like this;

(Pic by Christian Lue at Unsplash.com)

And some are linear like this;

(Pic by Freepik.com)

Of course, temperature starts way below and goes way above 0 – 100 C...There is a Kelvin temperature scale, Typically used

by scientists, which starts at “absolute zero”. This is -273.15 C or – 459.67 F. (See below)...And hotter than boiling point,

we have super heated – going all the way up to exploding star temperatures...

So, we could represent temperature in a number of different ways...

This is simply Freezing to boiling in Celsius/Centigrade inside and Farenheit outside. Here is the same again in linear form;

Next up – we have the same temperature range on the inner ring – and the hotter and colder bits on an outer ring...

Here is the outer ring in linear form;

To finish this section, that difference, between freezing and boiling, could be split into degrees any way you liked...

You could split it into 100 decimal degrees or 144decimal degrees – aka 100 Duodecimal degrees – just saying :-)

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Or read on for more details...

If you’re interested, here is a little history...

In the year 1714 Daniel Fahrenheit invented the mercury in glass thermometer. 10 years later he proposed a scale system for

measuring temperature. His system wanted to avoid negative numbers. So the freezing point of water was set at 32 degrees

and the boiling point set at 212 degrees.

The reason for this is that in those days, scientists were still (IMHO quite correctly) using the 360 degrees of the circle as the inspiration for measurements.

The difference between 32 and 212 is 180 = half of the 360 scale. It is a highly composite number – meaning it is very easy to divide ...

Some years later, in the year 1742, the Swedish scientist Anders Celsius -proposed a new scale of measuring temperature.

Initially his scale started at 100, and finished at boiling = 0. A year after his death, this was revised to what we use today...

Freezing = 0 and boiling = 100.

These days, there are at least 2 other scales – typically used by scientists... There is the Kelvin scale mentioned above – which is

works precisely with the Celsius scale, and the Rankine scale which works precisely with Farenheit.

Celsius

Farenheit

Kelvin

Rankine

So, I hope you found that little bit of history interesting?! Thanks for joining me...

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