Today in History

From this morning's Express:
"1701 Astronomer Anders Celsius, inventor of the Celsius temperature scale, is born in Uppsala, Sweden."

Well, being late November in Sweden, it was probably pretty cold, but they didn't have Celsius' scale to use to quantify how cold it was, unless he were the child prodigy of the ages. What did they use? Possibly a scale developed by Newton http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newton_scale

According to wikipedia, Fahrenheit's scale was proposed in 1724. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrenheit
The story of Professor Fahrenheit ties neatly into the history of the WSS, check this out: He took the lowest temperature which he measured in the winter of 1709 in his hometown of Danzig (−17.8 °C) as his zero point. That winter was infamous for its severity.

Unfortunately, wikipedia claims that Fahrenheit was copying the Dane, Rømer, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rømer_scale, whose scale dates to 1701.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_temperature_scales