The southern sentinel. (Winnfield, La.) 1883-1910, 1885-02-20
ZERO.
The History Of the Well-Known Mark On
tho Common Thermometer.

Inc History OF the Weii-hnoWn MARX "
tho Common Thermometer.
Zero on the common thermometer,
like the fanciful names of the con-
stellations, is an instance of the way
wise mems errors are made immor-
tai by becoming popular. Zero comes
to us through Spanish from the
Arabic, and means empty. hence moth
ing. In an expression like go de-
grees FAIR, the abbreviation Fair.
stands for Fahrenheit. Prussian
merchant. of DantZic, on the shores
of the Baltic Sea. His full name
was Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit. From
a boy he was a close observer of ma
ture, and when only nineteen years OF
age: in the remarkably cold winter
of 1909, he experimental by putting
snow and salt together, and no
ticed that it produced a degree of
cold equal to the coolest day of that
year. As that day was the coolest
the oldest inhabitant could remember,
Gabriel was more struck with the
coincidence of his little scientific
discovery, and hastily concluded he
had discovered the lowest de-
gree of temperature known to the
world, either natural or scientific. He
called that degree zero, and construct
ed thermometer, or rude weather.
glass, with scale graduated up from
the zero to the boiling point, which he
numbered 212, and the freezing point
thirty-two, because as he thought,
mercury contracted the thirty-second of
its volume on being cooled down from
the temperature of freezing water to
zero, and expanded the one hundred
and eightieth on being heated from the
freezing to the boiling point.
Time showed that this arrangement,
instead of being truly scientific. was as
arbitrary as the division of the Bible
into verses and chapters, and that these
two points no more represented the
real extremes of temperature .han
from Dan to Beersheba" exposed the
exact extremes of Palestine, But Fab
renheit's thermometer had been wide
~ adopted with its own inconvenient
scale, and none thought of any better
until his name became an authority,
for Fahrenheit finally abandoned
trade and gave himself up to sci
ence. This habit made people cling to
the established scale, as habit makes
the English cling to the old system of
cumbrous, fractional money. Our ma
ton began to use Fahrenheit's ther-
mometer about the middle of the last
century, or not far from the time when
old style was exchanged for the new
style in the writing of dates.
The three countries which use Fahr-
enheit are Holland, England and Amer
lea; Russia and Germany use Reaumer's
thermometer, in which the boiling point
is $50 degrees above freezing point.
France uses the Centigrade thermome-
ter, SO marked because it calls the boil
ing point 100 degrees from freezing
point. On many accounts the Cent?
grade system is the best, and the
triumph of convenience will be attained
when zero is made the freezing point,
and when the boiling point is made 100
or 1000 degrees from it. and all the |
subdivisions are fixed decimally. If |
Fahrenheit had done this at first, or il |
he had made it one of his many inn
provements after the public adopted HIS |
error, the luck of opportunity, which
was really his, would have secured to
his invention the patronage of the
Young People