Anders Celsius
Inventor of the Celsius tempurature scale
Early Life
Anders Celsius was born Uppsala, Sweden on November 27th, 1701. He was the son of an astronomy professor and the grandson of a mathemetician. He studied at the University of Uppsala where his father taught and in 1730 he became a professor there as well.
Early Research
One of his earliest researches concerned the Northern Lights, and he was the first to make a connection between the lights and the changes in the earth's magnetic field.
Career
Celsius went on an expedition with French Astronomer, Pierre-Louis Maupertuis to measure the degree of longitude. When he returned, he was appointed steward at the University.
He began a series of obervations using colored glass plates to record the magnitude of certain stars. This was the first attempt to measure the intensity of starlight with a tool other than the human eye.
The scale
The work for which Celsius was best known for was the creation of a hundred point scale for tempurature, though he was not the first to do so. He assigned the freezing and boiling points as the constant tempuratures at either end of the scale.
When the Celsius scale published in 1747 it was the reverse of todays scale with 0 degrees being the boiling pont of water and 100 degrees being the freezing point. A year later the two were exchanged creating the tempurature scale we use today.
Celsius originally called his scale Centigrade which meant "hundred steps" in Latin but for years it was always referred to as the Swedish thermometer. In 1948 most of the world adopted the scale, calling it the Celsius scale.
The End
On April 25th, 1744 at the age of 42, Anders Celsius died of tuberculosis, a terrible disease that attacks the lungs, bones, and many other body parts. He left behind many long writings of astronomy as well as a book called "Arithmetics for the Swedish Youth" which was published in 1741. The Celsius scale is the most widely used in the world today.