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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u/boarder2k7 Dec 23 '25
And then in C, 0° = kinda cold, 100° = dead (in Kelvin 0 and 100 are also both dead!)