this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] we_avoid_temptation@lemmy.zip 5 points 2 months ago

That's not either scale being intuitive or unintuitive, that's your familiarity with one over the other.

I got curious so I did some research on the definitions and why everything is this way. It looks like they originally picked the coldest thing they had (brine, possibly inspired by the coldest weather), the freezing point of water, human body temperature, and the boiling point of water. It was supposed to be brine at 0, water freezing at 30, the human body at 90, and water boiling at 240. Fahrenheit then recalibrated his scale slightly to make his math (and thermometer design and production) easier, and also because he noticed water actually boiled at 212 by his newly modified scale.

Looking at it like that work the context of what they had at the time and what they were trying to do, it makes a lot of sense.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit#History