I’ve seen it so many times because of the US, but it will never click.
Historically, on the Fahrenheit scale the freezing point of water was 32 °F, and the boiling point was 212 °F (at standard atmospheric pressure)
What the fuck dude… 32 and 212?
According to a German story, Fahrenheit actually chose the lowest air temperature measured in his hometown Danzig (Gdańsk, Poland) in winter 1708–09 as 0 °F, and only later had the need to be able to make this value reproducible using brine.[12][failed verification]
According to a letter Fahrenheit wrote to his friend Herman Boerhaave,[13] his scale was built on the work of Ole Rømer, whom he had met earlier. In Rømer scale, brine freezes at zero, water freezes and melts at 7.5 degrees, body temperature is 22.5, and water boils at 60 degrees. Fahrenheit multiplied each value by 4 in order to eliminate fractions and make the scale more fine-grained. He then re-calibrated his scale using the melting point of ice and normal human body temperature (which were at 30 and 90 degrees); he adjusted the scale so that the melting point of ice would be 32 degrees, and body temperature 96 degrees, so that 64 intervals would separate the two, allowing him to mark degree lines on his instruments by simply bisecting the interval 6 times (since 64 = 2^6).
Again, what the actual fuck? It’s just adjusted to the personal preferences of a dude with little account for the world.
- 0F = -17C (coldest point in Danzig in 1708)
- 32F = 0C (water freezing point)
- 100F = 37.78C (human body temperature)
- 212F = 100C (boiling point of water)
Makes no sense at all. And yet, some USAmericans like to parrot this reasoning
Early in the 20th century, Halsey and Dale suggested that reasons for resistance to use the centigrade (now Celsius) system in the U.S. included the larger size of each degree Celsius and the lower zero point in the Fahrenheit system; and claimed the Fahrenheit scale is more intuitive than Celsius for describing outdoor temperatures in temperate latitudes, with 100 °F being a hot summer day and 0 °F a cold winter day
What the fuck is a “hot summer day” and a “cold winter day”? That’s completely arbitrary. For some Brits 25C in summer can be “unbearable heat”. 37C may be the average summer day for some people around the equator. For some people in the North, -17C can be an average winter day with -40C being a “cold winter day”.
Is it US exceptionalism keeping Fahrenheit alive? Is it just tradition? In what world do 0, 32, 100, and 212 make sense as reference points?
Bonkers…
Yeah, it probably is the US (mostly) keeping it alive. The UK and a bunch of other former colonies still use some Imperial units to a limited extent. Even if they’re not using Fahrenheit, using any Imperial unit is propping up the entire system at least a little.
Some of these arguments also work against Celsius, too, although I agree it’s not as bad as Fahrenheit. Why focus on the freezing and boiling points of water at 1 atmosphere? Water boils well before 100C in Colorado, US, for example. We don’t use thermometers to figure out if water’s boiling anyway. We just look at it. For most people, communication regarding the temperature is for cooking and comfort. Where do we set the round numbers? Room temperature? Average baking temperature?
We could do that. Set 0 to room temperature and 100 to average baking temperature. It’s still going to have a bunch or use case problems like body temperature, which, by the way, really sucks in Celsius compared to Fahrenheit. Probably the only advantage of Fahrenheit is the smaller size of a degree. Yeah, we can get decimals involved, but it sounds weird outside of STEM fields.
I think the worst thing about Imperial Units is that it’s another system. The whole world using the Imperial Sytem would be less problematic than this mixture of SI and Imperial systems. Don’t get me wrong, I believe SI Units are what the one system should be, but it still has compromises. That’s one of the reasons some people are hesitant to let go of the Imperial System: it just happens to work well with their particular use case.
Because 1 atmosphere is something that can be recreated everywhere. How are you going to recreate the same conditions in Danzig from 1708 to measure 0F? 1 atmosphere can be measured by going to the ocean on any continent.
I… don’t even know where to begin with that. So we should do away with celsius because you can walk outside and say “it’s hot out, guess I didn’t need a thermometer!”. “Oh honey, you feel hot, you have a fever.” Guess we don’t need celsius! “Hey Dale, what temperature’s the water? -4C? The fuck are you talking about Dale??? Is it frozen or not? Don’t give me that shit!”
We should just go back to the days where we estimated the temperature of everything. Ice? Cold. Flowing river? Warm to me, cold to the other, person, so luke-warm. Boiling water? Yeah, can only be hot. Molten metal? Really hot! Lava? Super hot! The sun super duper hot, bro!