this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
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Science Memes

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More like guidelines (lemmy.world)
submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I've always been curious why 32 was chosen for the freezing point of water in Fahrenheit. or was there something else and did that just land at 32?

it's kind of a mystery and i love it

[–] zalgotext 31 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Fahrenheit is actually a base-ten system, where 0° was the freezing temperature of a salt/water mixture used in laboratories in the 18th century, and 100° was supposed to be a human's blood temperature. Another convenient perk of the fahrenheit system is that most European weather occurs inside it's 0-100 range.

Eventually Fahrenheit saw the scientific need to know the freezing and boiling point of plain water, but instead of adjusting his system, he just found those values within his system.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

The story I heard, and I don’t know if this is true or not, is that 100 isn’t just a human’s blood temperature, but specifically Mrs. Fahrenheit’s blood temperature.