Talk:Fahrenheit
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Disambiguation
Not sure how good an idea it is to have a disambiguation page here - have you looked at the multitude of pages that link here, all for the temperature scale meaning? Someone's going to have to fix all those links if this is to remain a disambiguation page. Mkweise 03:28 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)
- I agree and I'm moving it back. The graphics API is not at all famous enough to cause a reasonable ambiguity over the use of "Fahrenheit". --mav 03:51 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)
- Done. I gave the API a disambiguation block even though very few people will actually use it. --mav
Contentious historical details
Other factors contributing to selection of reference points
I removed this for now:
- Other accounts assert that Fahrenheit's goal was to produce a scale where the coldest and warmest air temperature extremes in Europe would be zero and 100 degrees, respectively, because the scale was devised to measure air temperature moreso than for laboratory experiments. It follows that his choice of salt water's freezing/melting point and the healthy human body temperature were just convenient, stable, consistently measurable reference points that would always be near these values.
- Some accounts go further and say that the scale was devised with each degree being the minimum change in air temperature that a human could perceive.
Checking three encyclopedias, the top Google hits and the Dictionary on Scientific Biography could not verify either claim. AxelBoldt 20:45 Mar 20, 2003 (UTC)
- Both claims were in a middle school science textbook in the early 1980s. As punishment for talking in class and tipping my seat, I had to manually transcribe several pages from it, including one about the Fahrenheit scale. Of course, I don't have the textbook now, and am recalling it from memory. But before adding those paragraphs, I spent about an hour trudging through articles that I found through Google. It was surprising how little consensus there is among the stories of Mr. Fahrenheit. However, I did find a "verification" of the first claim (i.e, an article stating that the purpose of the scale is believed to have been for common air/water temperature measurement). I felt that it should still be phrased in a manner that clarifies that there's very little reference material to back up any of the claims. I'm not terribly attached to the phrases either way; I just thought they should be mentioned in a "some say, others disagree" kind of way before someone comes along and plops them in as indisputable fact.mjb 20:32 Mar 22, 2003 (UTC)
The claim that I heard
- I heard that Mr. Farenheit decided to calibrate his scale with freezing water at the low point and the healthy human body at the high point. Unfortunately he was a bit light headed that day, and didn't think the process of taking the measurements though. He went outside on a Winter morning and took a reading of the temperature of the snow on the ground and called that 0. Then it took his own temperature, and unbenounced to him, he had a fever that day, explaining why he didn't think though his process for "freezing water." Like i said, i heard that story second hand, and i don't recall the source. take it however you want :) -- — Nate | Talk 05:46, Jun 14, 2005 (UTC)
Fahrenheit's name
When signing for Royal Society Fahrenheit wrote: Fahrenheit, Polonus. AM
- Anyone care to comment on this? — mjb 07:21, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
Adoption and abandonment of Fahrenheit system
There is still very little info in the article about which countries adopted the Fahrenheit scale, when this occurred, and when the scale was officially abandoned. If anyone has any info, even for a single country, please add it to the history section. — mjb 07:21, 4 May 2005 (UTC)
Avoid implicit criticism of countries that use Fahrenheit
Yes, the USA, and Jamaica, apparently, are the last holdout for Fahrenheit for everyday, non-scientific temperature measurement, but Wikipedia editors should not parlay their annoyance at this situation into non-NPOV prose. As of today, I've toned down the text in this article and in the Celsius article so that it reads less like commentary. There is no need to mention that Europeans find it "puzzling" that the USA is one of a "declining number of countries" "still" using this system, phrases which together imply fault. - mjb 00:47, 10 Apr 2004 (UTC)
- The article gives the impression that many European countries only switched to the Celsius scale in the 1960s. Is that correct? (I would have thought that only a few European countries ever used Fahrenheit, and that most of them adopted to Celsius (centigrade) much earlier, perhaps still in the 19th century. France in particular must have skipped straight from Réaumur to centigrade.)
Jorge Stolfi 07:12, 13 May 2004 (UTC)
Fahrenheit in the UK
Recently added by an anonymous contributor:
- In the United Kingdom, Fahrenheit is used mainly during summer months, and Celcius during winter months.
Is this really true? If so, it's fascinating, and there's probably more to say about it. If not, maybe some kind Brit can remove it. Cdc 18:31, 30 Jan 2005 (UTC)
- Yes, it's true. I live in Scotland and people refer to cold temperatures in Celcius and warm temperatures in Fahrenheit. I have trouble relating to temperatures like 39 ºF or 27 ºC, but I know what 4 ºC and 80 ºF feel like. I suppose we think in a scale of comfort where 0 is too cold, and 100 is too hot.
- As this point seems to have become obscured in recent updates, I've just rearranged the last paragraph of the history section a bit to make note of Fahrenheit's continued use in parts of Great Britain. I also borrowed some phrasing from the metrication article, which mentions Canada as another partial holdout, and also included a phrase from the U.S. customary units article, which provides further explanation for the continued popularity of non-metric measurement, aside from the "temperate climate air temps range from 0–100 ºF" explanation already given. — mjb 07:12, 4 May 2005 (UTC)