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Thermometer Facts

Thermometer Facts
A thermometer is a tool used to measure the temperature of something. The first known attempt at measuring temperature was done by a Greek physician and scientist in 170 AD named Galen. It wasn't until the 1500s when inventors such as Galileo Galilei began working on thermoscopes that tools to measure temperature began to be created. In 1612 Santorio Santorio put a scale to a thermoscope to measure human temperature. In 1654 the Grand Duke of Tuscany Ferdinand II invented an enclosed thermometer with alcohol inside. The first modern thermometer was invented in 1714 by Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a German physicist who also revealed the Fahrenheit scale a decade later.
Interesting Thermometer Facts:
A thermometer measures how cold or hot something is.
The simplest thermometers are glass tubes that contain a liquid, usually mercury or alcohol, which expands with hat or contracts with cold. As the liquid responds to the heat or cold it moves up or down the tube and the temperature can be read from the scale.
Many thermometers have both Celsius and Fahrenheit scales for reading the temperature.
There are a variety of medical thermometers that can be used depending on the patient, including oral thermometers, rectal thermometers, tympanic thermometers, and band thermometers.
Band thermometers are often used on small children. The band thermometer is placed on a patient's forehead and it reads their temperature.
There are a variety of thermometers for different uses including mercury-in-glass thermometers, alcohol-in-glass thermometers, clinical thermometers, digital thermometers, rotary thermometers, resistance thermometers, thermistor thermometers, liquid crystal thermometers, and infra-red thermometers.
Thermometers are used for a variety of purposes including for determining weather, for medical and scientific purposes, industrial and engineering uses, flight purposes, measuring water temperatures, and to help regulate and avoid disasters such as nuclear meltdowns.
In order for a material to be suitable for use in a thermometer that relies on pressure and volume of temperature, it must have three specific properties. It must heat and cool rapidly; it must be able to reverse heating and cooling indefinitely; it must be monotonic in heating and cooling.
A thermometer that does not hold its temperature when moved to a new temperature is called a non-registering thermometer.
Registering thermometers are those that hold their temperature when moved to a new temperature until reset.
Thermometers must be calibrated by comparing them with a fixed point on the temperature scale or by comparing them with an already calibrated thermometer.
The three major temperature scales for use in thermometers are Fahrenheit, Celsius, and Kelvin.
Thermometers are used for determining the temperature in regards to weather. A thermometer can help people decide what to wear or what to expect from the weather. If it is very cold and raining drivers can be warned about the potential for freezing rain.
Thermometers can be used to help determine if a person is sick because it can measure whether a person has a fever. The human body is usually 98.6 so if it measures higher the individual is considered to have a fever.


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