Daniel Fahrenheit Biography

Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit was a Dutch-German-Polish physicist, engineer and glassblower, inventor of the “Mercury Dilation of the Thermometer” and “Scale Fahrenheit” the technique that boosted the creation of the mercury thermometer is attributed to Galileo. He was born in the Danzig, now Gdansk, in Poland, on May 24, 1686.

Son of the merchant Daniel Fahrenheit and Concordia Schumann, his family was in a very good economic status, and he was educated to work in commerce. When his parents died, he was 15 years old and he started travelling to Germany, England and Denmark searching for study opportunities and in 1708 he would meet Romer, a Danish astronomer famous for being the first person to determine the speed of light, and who had devised a first thermometric scale based on the measurement of two temperatures: Equilibrium (ice-liquid water at 1 atmosphere) and body temperature.

Later, Fahrenheit settled in Amsterdam, where he worked as a glassblower, which aroused his interest in chemistry. He met the Dutch physicist Willem Jacobo Gravesande, and thanks to his orientation, he quit his job to devote himself to experimental physics, particularly in the manufacture of water thermometers in 1709, mercury thermometers in 1714, barometers, hygrometers, and pyrometers improving manufacturing techniques to have more accurate readings.

The most relevant theoretical contribution of Fahrenheit was the design of the Fahrenheit scale in the year 1724, whose symbol is ° F and which is the most used in the United States.

Fahrenheit printed his signature on world history. He used as a zero value of his scale the temperature of a mixture of water and salt in equal parts, and the freezing and boiling values ​​of conventional water were fixed at 32 and 212 respectively. Consequently, by covering a wider range, the Fahrenheit scale allowed greater precision than the centigrade when defining a specific temperature. He published these results in 1714, in Acta Editorum. At that time the thermometers had as reference liquid alcohol, and with the knowledge acquired by Romer from the thermal expansion of metals, and Fahrenheit could successfully replace it with mercury from the year 1716 and on.

When he returned to the Netherlands, he began to manufacture meteorological instruments, invented a hygrometer to measure the humidity of the air and a hydrometer to measure the density of the air.

Daniel Fahrenheit also published in 1724 several works on the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, an institution that welcomed him that same year and was admitted as a foreign member of the oldest scientific society in the United Kingdom, one of the oldest in Europe, thanks to his contributions to science.

His research focused on the boiling temperatures of various liquids, the solidification of water in the emptiness and the possibility of obtaining liquid water at a temperature lower than its normal freezing point.

Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit died in The Hague (Netherland), on September 16, 1736, at 50 years of age, because of mercury poisoning.