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Fahrenheit And The Mercury Thermometer

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Fahrenheit And The Mercury Thermometer
The first modern thermometer, a mercury thermometer with a standardized scale, was invented in 1714 by Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a German physicist who also invented the alcohol thermometer in 1709 and the mercury thermometer in 1714. Before Fahrenheit, Galileo Galilei and Santorio Santorio both created their own type of thermometers but both of their instruments could not measure the exact temperature. It only indicated temperature differences which classified their instruments a thermoscope. In 1612, Santario became the first inventor to apply a numerical scale to his thermoscope but it had poor accuracy. Fahrenheit introduced his standardized temperature scale named the “Fahrenheit Scale” that was applied to his mercury thermometer. This …show more content…
One those concepts is the idea of fixed points. Because water freezes at 0 degrees Celsius and boils at 100 degrees Celsius, you can mark those two points by putting the thermometer in freezing water and boiling water and marking where the mercury is in the thermometer at that those points. Because there is a 100 degree Celsius difference between those two points, you can then measure all of the different numbers on the scale by dividing the scale between those two fixed points. For example, the Celsius thermometer usually divides the scale by 1 degree from 0 to 100 degrees Celsius. Therefore, once you find where there the mercury lies in the thermometer for 0 and 100 degrees Celsius, you can mark those points and then divide a total of 100 equal steps between those two points in order to get each the measure of each degree between 0 and 100 degrees (ExplainThatStuff). Another mathematical concept involved in thermometers is the idea of linear relationships. The idea of linear relationships is that the correlation between two different variables can be depicted on a graph with a straight line. In thermometers, the temperature has a direct linear relationship with the rise of the mercury inside the thermometer. As a result,

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