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Fahrenheit is exactly what is wrong with USA
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2026
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They're both based on water, but Fahrenheit has a backstory.
The first iteration was designed by Ole Rømer. Rømer, an astronomer, liked working in 60s, so he defined a temperature scale where 0° was the coldest day in winter and 60° was the boiling point of water*. Due to historical accident of when Rømer made his minimum temperature measurement, the freezing point of water was defined as 7.5°.
Daniel Fahrenheit didn't like this; he though the freezing point of water should be an integer. So he slightly modified Rømer's scale, making the degrees a hair smaller. 0° remained the same, but in the Fahrenheit temperature scale, water freezes at 8° and boils at 64°*.
(Side note: Rømer and Fahrenheit used ice-ammonia mixtures to calibrate their thermometers, but those were not used to define 0°, contrary to popular belief).
Fahrenheit's early thermometers used alcohol, but he later started using mercury for more accurate instruments. Because mercury expands more than alcohol with the same temperature change, he invented a new scale in which the degrees were 1/4 the magnitude of his previous effort. In Fahrenheit's mercury scale, water freezes at 32° and boils at 256°*.
...but some time after that, it turned out that Rømer's original measurement of the boiling point of water was off by a lot (hence the asterisks in the above paragraphs). The actual difference between the freezing and boiling points if water was not 224°, but 180° (no doubt this would have pleased Rømer). The magnitude of a degree remained the same, but the actual boiling point of water turned out to be 212°.
And now you know.