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How Does A Thermometer Work?
Home » Gadgets » Galileo Thermometers » How Does A Thermometer Work?A thermometer is a device that measures the temperature of things. The name is made up of two smaller words: Thermo means heat and meter means to measure. You can use a thermometer to tell the temperature outside or inside your house, inside your oven, and even the temperature of your body if you’re sick.
Galileo was one of the earliest inventors of a thermometer. Galileo is said to have used a device called a thermoscope around 1600.
The thermometers we use today are different than the ones Galileo may have used. There is usually a bulb at the base of the thermometer with a long glass tube stretching out the top. Early thermometers used water, but because water freezes there was no way to measure temperatures less then the freezing point of water. Water was replaced with alcohol, which freezes at a temperature below the point that water freezes.
The thermometer measures temperatures in Fahrenheit, Celsius, and another scale called Kelvin. Fahrenheit is used mostly in the United States and most of the rest of the world uses Celsius. Kelvin is used by scientist.
Fahrenheit is named after the German physicist Gabriel D. Fahrenheit who developed his scale in 1724. Ice freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, F for short, and water boils at 212 degrees F. He arbitrarily decided that the difference between the freezing point and the boiling point of water should be 180 degrees.
The Celsius scale was named after Anders Celsius. The Celsius scale used to be called the centigrade scale. Centigrade means divided into 100 degrees. Anders Celsius developed his scale in 1742. He started with the freezing point of water and said that was 0 degrees Celsius, or C for short. At the point where water boils, he marked that at 100 degrees C. This scale is much more scientific because the measurement is broken down into an even 100 degrees. This is similar to the metric system, a scientific system of measuring distance and weight.
Kelvin is named after Sir William Thomson, Baron Kelvin of Largs, Lord Kelvin of Scotland. His scale starts at 0 degrees Kelvin, which is called absolute temperature. Lord Kelvin took the idea of temperature one step further with his invention of the Kelvin Scale in 1848. The Kelvin Scale measures the coldest temperature there can be. He stated there was no upper limit of how hot things can get, but there was a limit as to how cold things can get. Kelvin developed the idea of Absolute Zero. Absolute Zero is at minus 273.15 degrees Celsius or minus 523.67 Fahrenheit. At this temperature, everything, including the movement of electrons in an atom, stops completely.
Resources:
WWW.DENCITIES.COM
WWW.WEATHERSHOP.COM
WWW.LITENCYC.COM
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