Gabriel Fahrenheit
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Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit FRS (; ; 24 May 1686 – 16 September 1736) was a
physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...
,
inventor An invention is a unique or novel device, method, composition, idea, or process. An invention may be an improvement upon a machine, product, or process for increasing efficiency or lowering cost. It may also be an entirely new concept. If an ...
, and
scientific instrument A scientific instrument is a device or tool used for scientific purposes, including the study of both natural phenomena and theoretical research. History Historically, the definition of a scientific instrument has varied, based on usage, laws, an ...
maker, born in
Poland Poland, officially the Republic of Poland, is a country in Central Europe. It extends from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Sudetes and Carpathian Mountains in the south, bordered by Lithuania and Russia to the northeast, Belarus and Ukrai ...
to a family of
German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...
extraction. Fahrenheit invented thermometers accurate and consistent enough to allow the comparison of
temperature Temperature is a physical quantity that quantitatively expresses the attribute of hotness or coldness. Temperature is measurement, measured with a thermometer. It reflects the average kinetic energy of the vibrating and colliding atoms making ...
measurements between different observers using different instruments. Fahrenheit is also credited with inventing mercury-in-glass thermometers more accurate and superior to spirit-filled thermometers at the time. The popularity of his thermometers led to the widespread adoption of his
Fahrenheit scale The Fahrenheit scale () is a temperature scale based on one proposed in 1724 by the German-Polish physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–1736). It uses the degree Fahrenheit (symbol: °F) as the unit. Several accounts of how he original ...
attached to his instruments.Grigull, Ulrich (1966). ''Fahrenheit, a Pioneer of Exact Thermometry''. (The Proceedings of the 8th International Heat Transfer Conference, San Francisco, 1966, Vol. 1, pp. 9–18.)


Biography


Early life

Fahrenheit was born in Gdańsk (Danzig), then in the
Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth The Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, also referred to as Poland–Lithuania or the First Polish Republic (), was a federation, federative real union between the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland, Kingdom of Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania ...
. The Fahrenheits were a German
Hanse The Hanseatic League was a Middle Ages, medieval commercial and defensive network of merchant guilds and market towns in Central Europe, Central and Northern Europe, Northern Europe. Growing from a few Northern Germany, North German towns in the ...
merchant family who had lived in several
Hanseatic The Hanseatic League was a Middle Ages, medieval commercial and defensive network of merchant guilds and market towns in Central Europe, Central and Northern Europe, Northern Europe. Growing from a few Northern Germany, North German towns in the ...
cities. Fahrenheit's great-grandfather had lived in
Rostock Rostock (; Polabian language, Polabian: ''Roztoc''), officially the Hanseatic and University City of Rostock (), is the largest city in the German States of Germany, state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and lies in the Mecklenburgian part of the sta ...
, and research suggests that the Fahrenheit family originated in
Hildesheim Hildesheim (; or ; ) is a city in Lower Saxony, in north-central Germany with 101,693 inhabitants. It is in the district of Hildesheim (district), Hildesheim, about southeast of Hanover on the banks of the Innerste River, a small tributary of t ...
. Daniel's grandfather moved from Kneiphof in
Königsberg Königsberg (; ; ; ; ; ; , ) is the historic Germany, German and Prussian name of the city now called Kaliningrad, Russia. The city was founded in 1255 on the site of the small Old Prussians, Old Prussian settlement ''Twangste'' by the Teuton ...
(then in the
Duchy of Prussia The Duchy of Prussia (, , ) or Ducal Prussia (; ) was a duchy in the region of Prussia established as a result of secularization of the Monastic Prussia, the territory that remained under the control of the State of the Teutonic Order until t ...
) to Gdańsk and settled there as a merchant in 1650. His son, Daniel Fahrenheit (the father of Daniel Gabriel), married Concordia Schumann, the daughter of a well-known Gdańsk business family. Daniel was the eldest of the five Fahrenheit children (two sons, three daughters) who survived childhood. His sister, Virginia Elisabeth Fahrenheit, married Benjamin Krüger and was the mother of Benjamin Ephraim Krüger, a clergyman and playwright. As a young adult, Fahrenheit "showed a particular desire for studying," and was scheduled to enroll in the Danzig Gymnasium. But on 14 August 1701, his parents died after eating poisonous mushrooms. Fahrenheit, along with two brothers and sisters, was placed under guardianship. In 1702, Fahrenheit's guardians enrolled him in a bookkeeping course and sent him to a four-year merchant trade apprenticeship in
Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , ; ; ) is the capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, largest city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It has a population of 933,680 in June 2024 within the city proper, 1,457,018 in the City Re ...
. Upon completing his apprenticeship, Fahrenheit ran off and began a period of travel through the
Holy Roman Empire The Holy Roman Empire, also known as the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation after 1512, was a polity in Central and Western Europe, usually headed by the Holy Roman Emperor. It developed in the Early Middle Ages, and lasted for a millennium ...
, Sweden, and Denmark in 1707. At the request of his guardians, a warrant was issued for his arrest with the intention of placing him into the service of the Dutch East India company.


Work with thermometers, Fahrenheit scale

By around 1706, Fahrenheit was manufacturing and shipping barometers and spirit-filled thermometers using the . In 1708, Fahrenheit met with the mayor of Copenhagen and astronomer,
Ole Rømer Ole Christensen Rømer (; 25 September 1644 – 19 September 1710) was a Danes, Danish astronomer who, in 1676, first demonstrated that light travels at a finite speed. Rømer also invented the modern thermometer showing the temperature between ...
, and was introduced to Rømer's temperature scale and his methods for making thermometers. Rømer told Fahrenheit that demand for accurate thermometers was high. The visit inspired Fahrenheit to try to improve his own offerings.* Perhaps not coincidentally, Fahrenheit's arrest warrant was dropped around the time of his meeting with Rømer. In 1709, Fahrenheit returned to Gdańsk and took observations using his barometers and thermometers, traveled more in 1710 and returned to Danzig in 1711 to settle his parents' estate. After additional travel to Königsberg and Mitau in 1711, he returned to Gdańsk in 1712 and stayed there for two years. During this period he worked on solving technical problems with his thermometers. Fahrenheit began experimenting with mercury thermometers in 1713. Also by this time, Fahrenheit was using a modified version of Rømer's scale for his thermometers which would later evolve into his own
Fahrenheit scale The Fahrenheit scale () is a temperature scale based on one proposed in 1724 by the German-Polish physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–1736). It uses the degree Fahrenheit (symbol: °F) as the unit. Several accounts of how he original ...
. In 1714, Fahrenheit left Gdańsk for Berlin and Dresden to work closely with the glass-blowers there. In that year Christian Wolff wrote about Fahrenheit's thermometers in a journal after receiving a pair of his alcohol-based devices, helping to boost Fahrenheit's reputation in the scientific community. In addition to his interest in meteorological instruments, Fahrenheit also worked on his ideas for a mercury clock, a perpetual motion machine, and a
heliostat A heliostat () is a device that reflects sunlight toward a target, turning to compensate for the Sun's apparent motion. The reflector is usually a plane mirror. The target may be a physical object, distant from the heliostat, or a direct ...
around 1715. He struck up a correspondence with
Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (or Leibnitz; – 14 November 1716) was a German polymath active as a mathematician, philosopher, scientist and diplomat who is credited, alongside Sir Isaac Newton, with the creation of calculus in addition to many ...
about some of these projects. From the exchange of letters, we learn that Fahrenheit was running out of money while working on his projects and asked Leibniz for help obtaining a paid post so he could continue his work. In 1717 or 1718, Fahrenheit returned to Amsterdam and began selling barometers,
areometer A hydrometer or lactometer is an instrument used for measuring density or relative density of liquids based on the concept of buoyancy. They are typically Calibration, calibrated and Graduation (instrument), graduated with one or more scales suc ...
s, and his mercury and alcohol-based thermometers commercially. By 1721, Fahrenheit had perfected the process of crafting and standardizing his thermometers. The superiority of his mercury thermometers over alcohol-based thermometers made them very popular, leading to the widespread adoption of his Fahrenheit scale, the measurement system he developed and used for his thermometers.


Later life and controversy

Fahrenheit spent the remainder of his life in Amsterdam. From 1718 onward, he lectured in chemistry in Amsterdam. He visited England in 1724 and was elected into the
Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the Fellows of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural science, natural knowledge, incl ...
on May 5. In that year, he published five papers in
Latin Latin ( or ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally spoken by the Latins (Italic tribe), Latins in Latium (now known as Lazio), the lower Tiber area aroun ...
for the Royal Society's scientific journal, ''
Philosophical Transactions ''Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society'' is a scientific journal published by the Royal Society. In its earliest days, it was a private venture of the Royal Society's secretary. It was established in 1665, making it the second journ ...
'', on various topics. In his second paper, "Experimenta et observationes de congelatione aquæ in vacuo factæ", he provides a description of his thermometers and the reference points he used for calibrating them. For two centuries, this document was the only description of Fahrenheit's process for making thermometers. In the 20th century, Ernst Cohen uncovered correspondences between Fahrenheit and
Herman Boerhaave Herman Boerhaave (, 31 December 1668 – 23 September 1738Underwood, E. Ashworth. "Boerhaave After Three Hundred Years." ''The British Medical Journal'' 4, no. 5634 (1968): 820–25. .) was a Dutch chemist, botanist, Christian humanist, and ph ...
which cast considerable doubt on the veracity of Fahrenheit's article explaining the reference points for his scale and that, in fact, Fahrenheit's scale was largely derived from Rømer's scale. In his book, ''The History of the Thermometer and Its Use in Meteorology'', W. E. Knowles Middleton writes, From August 1736 to his death, Fahrenheit stayed in the house of Johannes Frisleven at Plein Square in The Hague in connection with an application for a
patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...
at the
States of Holland and West Friesland The States of Holland and West Frisia () were the representation of the two Estates of the realm, Estates (''standen'') to the court of the Count of Holland. After the Dutch Republic, United Provinces were formed — and there no longer was a count, ...
. At the beginning of September, he became ill and on the 7th his health had deteriorated to such an extent that he had
notary A notary is a person authorised to perform acts in legal affairs, in particular witnessing signatures on documents. The form that the notarial profession takes varies with local legal systems. A notary, while a legal professional, is distin ...
Willem Ruijsbroek come to draw up his will. On the 11th, the notary came by again to make some changes. Five days after that, Fahrenheit died at the age of fifty. Four days later, he received the fourth-class funeral of one who is classified as destitute, in the Kloosterkerk in The Hague (the Cloister or Monastery Church).Star, Pieter van der
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit's Letters to Leibniz and Boerhaave
Rodopi Publishers, Amsterdam 1983.


Fahrenheit scale

According to Fahrenheit's 1724 article, he determined his scale by reference to three fixed points of
temperature Temperature is a physical quantity that quantitatively expresses the attribute of hotness or coldness. Temperature is measurement, measured with a thermometer. It reflects the average kinetic energy of the vibrating and colliding atoms making ...
. The lowest temperature was achieved by preparing a frigorific mixture of
ice Ice is water that is frozen into a solid state, typically forming at or below temperatures of 0 ° C, 32 ° F, or 273.15 K. It occurs naturally on Earth, on other planets, in Oort cloud objects, and as interstellar ice. As a naturally oc ...
, water, and a salt ("
ammonium chloride Ammonium chloride is an inorganic chemical compound with the chemical formula , also written as . It is an ammonium salt of hydrogen chloride. It consists of ammonium cations and chloride anions . It is a white crystalline salt (chemistry), sal ...
or even sea salt"), and waiting for the
eutectic system A eutectic system or eutectic mixture ( ) is a type of a homogeneous mixture that has a melting point lower than those of the constituents. The lowest possible melting point over all of the mixing ratios of the constituents is called the ''eutec ...
to reach equilibrium temperature. The thermometer then was placed into the mixture and the liquid in the thermometer allowed to descend to its lowest point. The thermometer's reading there was taken as . The second reference point was selected as the reading of the thermometer when it was placed in still water when ice was just forming on the surface. This was assigned as . The third calibration point, taken as , was selected as the thermometer's reading when the instrument was placed under the arm or in the mouth. Fahrenheit came up with the idea that mercury boils around 300 degrees on this
temperature scale Scale of temperature is a methodology of calibrating the physical quantity temperature in metrology. Empirical scales measure temperature in relation to convenient and stable parameters or reference points, such as the freezing and boiling point ...
. Work by others showed that water boils about 180 degrees above its freezing point. The Fahrenheit scale later was redefined to make the freezing-to-boiling interval exactly 180 degrees, a convenient value as 180 is a
highly composite number A highly composite number is a positive integer that has more divisors than all smaller positive integers. If ''d''(''n'') denotes the number of divisors of a positive integer ''n'', then a positive integer ''N'' is highly composite if ''d''(' ...
, meaning that it is evenly divisible into many fractions. It is because of the scale's redefinition that normal mean body temperature today is taken as 98.6 degrees, whereas it was 96 degrees on Fahrenheit's original scale. The
Fahrenheit scale The Fahrenheit scale () is a temperature scale based on one proposed in 1724 by the German-Polish physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–1736). It uses the degree Fahrenheit (symbol: °F) as the unit. Several accounts of how he original ...
was the primary temperature standard for climatic, industrial and medical purposes in English-speaking countries until the 1970s, presently mostly replaced by the
Celsius scale The degree Celsius is the unit of temperature on the Celsius temperature scale "Celsius temperature scale, also called centigrade temperature scale, scale based on 0 ° for the melting point of water and 100 ° for the boiling point ...
long used in the rest of the world, apart from the United States, where temperatures and weather reports are still broadcast in Fahrenheit.


See also

* Fahrenheit hydrometer * People from Gdańsk (Danzig) *
Anders Celsius Anders Celsius (; 27 November 170125 April 1744) was a Swedes, Swedish astronomer, physicist and mathematician. He was professor of astronomy at Uppsala University from 1730 to 1744, but traveled from 1732 to 1735 visiting notable observatories ...
*
Lord Kelvin William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin (26 June 182417 December 1907), was a British mathematician, Mathematical physics, mathematical physicist and engineer. Born in Belfast, he was the Professor of Natural Philosophy (Glasgow), professor of Natur ...


References


Further reading

* * * (Latin) * * (Czech) * * * * (Russian) *


External links

* Letter from Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit
scan
to
Carl Linnaeus Carl Linnaeus (23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné,#Blunt, Blunt (2004), p. 171. was a Swedish biologist and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the modern system of naming o ...
, 7 May 1736 n.s.

* *
Fahrenheit's papers in the Royal Society Publishing
{{DEFAULTSORT:Fahrenheit, Daniel Gabriel 1686 births 1736 deaths Immigrants to the Dutch Republic Fellows of the Royal Society 17th-century people from the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth Scientists from Gdańsk Creators of temperature scales