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Anders Celsius, 1701-1744 Anders Celsius is one of the many great scientists that Sweden has produced. His Celsius temperature scale has become the world standard for measuring temperature and for scientific applications. How cold is it today? We hear his name every time that we listen to the weather forecast and we see his invention every time that we look at the thermometer. Anders Celsius, physicist and astronomer, is the man who invented the Celsius temperature scale. Celsius was born at Ovanåker, Hälsingland, Sweden. He was a professor of astronomy at Uppsala University from 1730 until his death in 1744. Astronomy was his passion: he made observations of eclipses and stars, presided at about twenty dissertations in astronomy, published catalogues of magnitudes for 300 stars and was director and one of the founders of the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory. So, how an astronomer came up to invent the world's standard thermometer? Well, he needed a thermometer for his meteorological observations , so he constructed the centigrade thermometer, with 0 for the boiling point of water and 100 for the freezing point. Celsius first proposed his temperature scale to the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1742, and it soon became the world's standard measure for scientific applications. A leading 18th century astronomer When Celsius became a professor of astronomy at the Uppsala University in 1730 there wasn't any large observatory in Sweden. He soon packed his bags and in 1732 began a 4-year tour of Europe, visiting the best observatories in Germany, France and Italy, and working with many of the leading 18th century astronomers. One of the major discussions within the scientific community at that time was about the actual shape of the Earth. From 1735 to 1737 Celsius took part in earth measuring expeditions to the Ecuator and to Torneå in Swedish Lapland, after which he confirmed the theory of Newton that the shape of the earth is an ellipsoid flattened at the poles. Celsius' participation in this expedition made him famous and gave him the support of the Swedish authorities to build a modern observatory in Uppsala, which was finished in 1741 with the most modern instrumental technology at that time. Celsius traveled many times to Lapland to study the Aurora Borealis, where he realized the changes of the Earth's magnetic field at the time of the Northern lights and discovered that the Aurora's magnetic activity influences compass needles. Celsius was also one of the first astronomers to measure the brightness of stars with measurement tools. The Celsius Temperature Scale At the time when Anders Celsius lived and worked, in the 18th century, there were a large variety of thermometers with different scales but no international standards. Celsius began to see the need of a common international scale for temperature measurements and started working on an international temperature scale on scientific grounds. In 1742 he introduced his Celsius mercury thermometer where 100 was the frozing point of water and 0 was the boiling point. Two years later, Celsius died of tuberculosis at the age of 42. After his death the Celsius' thermometer scale was reversed with 0 as the frozing point of water and 100 as the boiling point. The turned-around scale was accepted as standard in Sweden and soon thereafter in most other countries. In 1948 the system's name was officially changed from Centigrade to Celsius by the 9th General Conference on Weights and Measures, and in 1954 the Celsius temperature scale was officially declared international standard. The USA and Jamaica remain the last two countries in the world which are still using the measuring unit of Dutch-German physicist Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit.
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