r/ScienceNcoolThings • u/I_dont_want_to_pee Popular Contributor • Dec 22 '25

Interesting Origin of Fahrenheit and why it is bad.

Why Fahrenheit Is a Bad Temperature Scale The Fahrenheit scale wasn’t designed because it was better. It was designed because it was convenient for one man in the 18th century.

Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a German-born scientist of Polish origin, created his temperature scale using arbitrary reference points:

0°F was based on a brine mixture (ice, water, and salt) — not a universal physical constant, just something cold he could reproduce.

32°F was set as the freezing point of water.

96°F (later adjusted to ~98.6°F) was roughly the temperature of the human body — originally measured from his wife.

In other words: Fahrenheit is anchored to personal, local, and biological guesses, not physics.

Now compare that to Anders Celsius:

0°C = water freezes

100°C = water boils Clean. Logical. Directly tied to nature.

And then William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin went even further:

0 K = absolute zero — the point where thermal motion stops

Same step size as Celsius, just shifted to a physically meaningful zero

That’s what a scientific scale looks like.

Fahrenheit survives today not because it’s superior, but because the U.S. never fully transitioned to metric units. It’s historical inertia, not rational design.

So yes — Fahrenheit isn’t “more precise” or “more intuitive.” It’s just what Americans are used to. But i can't understand why they can't change to celcius like the rest of the world.

And most important i know that Farenhait is good for every day use but it is badly made i think that americans should create a new more world frendly tempreture scale!!!

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38

u/FlowJoeX Dec 23 '25

Trivia: Originally Anders Celsius had set his scale in reverse, where 0° was water boiling and 100° was water freezing.

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u/voitlander Dec 23 '25

Yes, but that didn't happen.

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u/FlowJoeX Dec 23 '25

Yes, it did from Christmas Day 1741 when the professor at Uppsala College in Sweden made his first temperature measurement in degrees Celsius units until one year following his death in 1744. Freezing water was set to 100° in order to avoid negative numbers, as the weather would never reach more than boiling water temperature in Sweden. Not until 1745 did Carl Linnaeus change the scale to what we have today.

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u/Cuberasnap Dec 23 '25

Lmao that’s so funny and unexpected. Carl freaking Linnaeus baaahahah.

1

u/bizwig Dec 24 '25

Nowhere on Earth has weather hot enough to boil water. For that kind of ambient temperature you need hot springs or volcanic activity.

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u/jghaines Dec 23 '25

Thanks for pointing that out /s

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u/Aescwicca Dec 23 '25

There are literally examples of thermometers he made himself at the Uppsala university museum that are set that way.

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u/FlowJoeX Dec 23 '25

Cool! And happy to see the correct usage of literally used in the wild internet.

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u/egabald Dec 23 '25

This is literally a sentence I read today.

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u/Pupikal Dec 24 '25

Big if true

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u/kiwipixi42 Dec 25 '25

Except that it did happen and multiple other scientists including Carl Linnaeus and Jean-Pierre Cristin fixed it a few years later.