Anders Celsius

Hello! My name is Anders Celsius. I was born in Uppsala, Sweden on November

27, 1701. I was born into a very highly scientific and scholarly family. My grandfathers

were both astronomers and my father, Nils Celsius, was an astronomy professor at the

Uppsala University. Also, I studied at the University of Uppsala, became secretary of

Uppsala’s scientific society, and succeeded my father as the professor of astronomy there

in 1730.

I traveled for several years to further my studies. I went on an expedition into

Lapland with the French astronomer, Pierre-Louis Maupertuis, to measure a degree on

longitude. My first stop traveling was the new observatory in Berlin. Then, I traveled to

Nuremberg and published writings of my own. After, I visited Venice, Padsa, and

Bologne before continuation on to Rome and then Paris. I went to London to help

Maupertuis to prove a theory a while after.

In 1737, I returned to Uppsala and took over Sweden’s first modern observatory.

This opened in December of 1742. Also, upon my return, I began a series of observations

using colored glass plates to record the magnitude of certain stars. This led to the first

attempt to measure the intensity of starlight with a tool other than the human eye.

I am known for creating a hundred-point scale for temperature. However, I am not

the first to do this. The difference is that I modified and assigned the freezing and boiling

points of water as the constant temperature at either end of the scale. Unlike Fahrenheit, I

based my scale on two fixed points: the boiling and melting points of water. I first

assigned the boiling point at 0 degrees and the melting point at 100 but soon reversed

this. In the competition between me and Fahrenheit’s temperature scales, I finally won

because my scale was adopted by the scientific community and used in almost all scientific work.

I originally called my scale centigrade,