50 Fun Facts About Fahrenheit

In which year did Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit propose the temperature scale that bears his name?

He published it in Latin in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions the same year he was elected a Fellow.

At what temperature does water freeze on the Fahrenheit scale?

On Fahrenheit's own first version ice water was 30 degrees; he moved it to 32 so that 64 intervals separated freezing from body temperature.

At what temperature does water boil on the Fahrenheit scale at sea level?

That puts freezing and boiling exactly 180 degrees apart, a number chosen partly because it divides so neatly.

How many Fahrenheit degrees separate the freezing and boiling points of water?

One Fahrenheit degree is therefore 5/9 of a Celsius degree.

What did Fahrenheit use to fix the zero point of his original scale?

A German story says he really used the coldest winter air temperature in his home town of Danzig in 1708-09 and only later needed the brine to reproduce it.

What was the upper reference point of Fahrenheit's original scale?

He first set it at 90 and then 96; the later redefinition of the scale is why normal body temperature is now quoted as 98.6.

On Fahrenheit's original scale, what number did he assign to the warmth of a healthy person?

With ice water at 32, that gave 64 intervals, which he could mark on a thermometer by halving the gap six times.

Whose earlier temperature scale did Fahrenheit build on, according to his letter to Herman Boerhaave?

On Romer's scale brine froze at 0, water at 7.5 and boiled at 60; Fahrenheit multiplied everything by four to get rid of the fractions.

At what temperature do the Fahrenheit and Celsius scales read the same number?

Because of that, an exact conversion trick is to add 40, multiply or divide by 1.8, then subtract 40.

What is absolute zero on the Fahrenheit scale?

That equals 0 kelvin and -273.15 C; the Rankine scale puts its zero there while keeping Fahrenheit-sized degrees.

Which absolute temperature scale uses degrees the same size as Fahrenheit's but starts at absolute zero?

It was proposed in 1859 by the Glasgow engineer W. J. M. Rankine, eleven years after Kelvin's.

To convert Celsius to Fahrenheit, you multiply by 1.8 and then add what?

So 100 C becomes 212 F and 37 C becomes 98.6 F.

A temperature difference of 1 F equals what interval on the Celsius scale?

Intervals convert by ratio alone, so an increase of 18 F is an increase of 10 C.

How many years after the Fahrenheit scale was the Celsius scale developed?

Anders Celsius proposed his in 1742, and his original version ran backwards, with water boiling at 0 and freezing at 100.

How was Anders Celsius's original 1742 scale different from today's Celsius scale?

The unit was called centigrade in many languages until 1948, when it was renamed to honour Celsius.

Which large country is the notable holdout still using Fahrenheit for everyday temperatures?

Its Pacific associates Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, plus the Cayman Islands and Liberia, do too.

Which British Overseas Territory in the Caribbean still uses Fahrenheit for everyday purposes?

Bermuda, Montserrat, Anguilla and the Virgin Islands use both scales.

Which West African country is listed alongside America as still using Fahrenheit?

Liberia was founded by freed American slaves and, like the US, also never fully adopted the metric system.

When did the British Meteorological Office officially adopt centigrade as its standard?

It kept giving Fahrenheit in public broadcasts into the 1980s, and UK tabloids still use it for heatwaves because 94 F sounds hotter than 34 C.

On what kitchen appliance is Fahrenheit still used almost universally in Canada?

Canadian weather reports are in Celsius, but thermometers sold there usually show both scales.

Which scientist led the 1776-77 Royal Society committee that fixed water's freezing and boiling points as references?

That redefinition nudged the scale so that body temperature moved from 96 to about 98.6.

On the modern scale, roughly what temperature does the ammonium-chloride brine Fahrenheit used as zero reach?

Sea salt brine goes lower, to about -8 F, so his zero point was never really reproducible.

In which city was Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit born in 1686?

He was from a German Hanseatic merchant family and spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic.

How did Fahrenheit's parents die in 1701, leaving him an orphan at 15?

His guardians packed him off to a merchant apprenticeship in Amsterdam; when he ran away, a warrant was issued to press him into the Dutch East India Company.

Fahrenheit is credited with producing the first successful thermometers filled with which liquid?

They were more accurate than the spirit-filled thermometers of the day, and their popularity spread his scale with them.

In which city did Fahrenheit spend his later life, selling barometers and thermometers?

He lectured in chemistry there from 1718 and died in The Hague in 1736, poor enough to receive a fourth-class pauper's funeral.

Which philosopher and mathematician did Fahrenheit correspond with about his clock and perpetual-motion ideas?

He asked for help getting a paid post because he was running out of money for his experiments.

In which journal did Fahrenheit publish five Latin papers in 1724, one on his thermometers?

He had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society that May; for two centuries that paper was the only description of how he made thermometers.

Which Danish astronomer's thermometer-making methods inspired Fahrenheit when they met in 1708?

Romer was also mayor of Copenhagen; the arrest warrant against Fahrenheit was dropped around the time of their meeting.

How old was Fahrenheit when he died in The Hague in September 1736?

He was there applying for a patent, fell ill, rewrote his will twice, and was buried in the Kloosterkerk.

What is the highest air temperature ever officially recorded on Earth, at Death Valley in 1913?

That is 56.7 C; several experts doubt the reading, and if it were struck off, three places would tie at 129.2 F.

What, in Fahrenheit, was the record low temperature recorded at Vostok Station in 1983?

That is -89.2 C, measured in the air above the Antarctic ice on 21 July 1983.

What is the widely quoted normal reading for a healthy human on a Fahrenheit thermometer?

It corresponds to 37 C, a 'normal' established in the 1800s; the real normal range runs roughly 97.7 to 99.5 F.

Who wrote the 1953 dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451?

He wrote it during the McCarthy era, inspired by Nazi book burnings and Stalin's purges: 'They burned the authors instead of the books.'

What is the job of Guy Montag, the protagonist of Fahrenheit 451?

He grows disillusioned and ends up joining exiles who memorise books to preserve them.

Michael Moore's title Fahrenheit 9/11 likens the date of the attacks to what?

One of the film's taglines was 'The Temperature at Which Freedom Burns'.

Which top prize did Fahrenheit 9/11 win at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival?

It became the highest-grossing documentary ever at over $220 million, until Michael Jackson's This Is It passed it in 2009.

Which French director filmed Fahrenheit 451 in 1966 with Oskar Werner and Julie Christie?

Bradbury noted the film changed the ending so that Clarisse survives among the exiles; a 2018 TV film starred Michael B. Jordan.

What is the eight-legged robotic creature that hunts book hoarders in Fahrenheit 451?

It lives in the firehouse; Montag's fire chief is Captain Beatty.

Under what title was the 2005 Quantic Dream game Fahrenheit released in North America?

David Cage wrote its 2,000-page script in a year; the plot follows Lucas Kane, who commits a murder while possessed.

Which fashion house launched the men's fragrance Fahrenheit in 1988?

The Unicode standard, meanwhile, discourages the dedicated ℉ character in favour of a plain degree sign plus F.

According to Halsey and Dale, why did Americans find Fahrenheit more intuitive for weather?

They also cited the larger size of a Celsius degree and Fahrenheit's lower zero point as reasons for resistance to centigrade.

In which decade did most English-speaking countries other than the US switch from Fahrenheit to Celsius?

Until then Fahrenheit was the standard for weather, industry and medicine across the Anglophone world.

Which absolute scale are both Fahrenheit and Celsius formally defined in terms of?

Since 2019 the kelvin itself is defined by fixing the Boltzmann constant rather than by the triple point of water.

Which three freely associated Pacific states of the US still use Fahrenheit through the National Weather Service?

They join the US, its territories, the Cayman Islands and Liberia as the last places where Fahrenheit is the everyday scale.

A German story says Fahrenheit set 0 °F at the coldest air temperature recorded where in winter 1708-09?

Only later, the tale goes, did he need a reproducible brine mixture to recreate that reading in his workshop.

Why are some UK tabloids said to prefer Fahrenheit for hot weather headlines?

The reasoning runs that '94 °F' sounds hotter than '34 °C', while '−6 °C' sounds colder than '21 °F'.

When the young Fahrenheit ran off in 1707, his guardians had a warrant issued to press him into whose service?

The warrant was conveniently dropped around the time of his 1708 meeting with the astronomer Ole Rømer in Copenhagen.

Fahrenheit's earliest spirit-filled thermometers, from around 1706, were graduated according to which system?

He only began experimenting with mercury in 1713, by which time he was using a modified Rømer scale that evolved into his own.

What honour did Fahrenheit receive on 5 May 1724 during a visit to England?

From 1718 he had lectured in chemistry in Amsterdam, where he spent the rest of his life.