A MATTER OF DEGREES

I read this on a Swedish gardener's blog (the rest of the blog is a bit old and ordinary). The picture is from Google images. These types of facts slip through my mind like a hot knife through butter but its good to try to harden up that butter sometimes and get the facts to stick.

"Did you by the way know that Celsius is named after the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius who lived from 1701 to 1744? He invented a temperature scale based on water. In the original scale water freezes at 100°C and boils at 0°C (!). The scale was however reversed after just a few years. It probably seemed more logic to increase the figure with raising temperature than to do the opposite.

The Fahrenheit scale on the other hand is named after Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit who was a German physicist who lived in the Netherlands for a big part of his life. He defined the coldest temperature attainable under laboratory conditions at that time as 0°F and the body temperature of a healthy horse as 100°F.

If I was to invent a temperature scale I’d set 0°L (degrees Linn) at the soil temperature when the first snowdrop ‘Galanthus nivalis’ starts to flower. 100°L would be the temperature of the wooden floor on my porch at sunset after a sunny summers day. It is a local scale, I admit. But a useful one. Between 0 and 100, life is good. And hey, it is not much stranger than the body temperature of a horse anyway. "