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November 1965 Electronics World
Table of Contents
Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles
from
Electronics World, published May 1959
- December 1971. All copyrights hereby acknowledged.
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You've heard of the Fahrenheit,
Centigrade (Celsius), Kelvin, and Rankine temperature scales, but what
about the Réaumur scale? This 1965 Electronics World magazine article presents
all five along with formulas for converting between them. Each temperature scale
is named in honor of its creator.
Daniel Gabriel
Fahrenheit came up with his scale where, under
standard
atmospheric pressure (14.7 lb/in2) pure water freezes at 32°
and boils at 212°. Anders
Celsius decided a more sensible temperature scale would place freezing water
at 0° and boiling water at 100°.
William
Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvin set his scale, which has been adopted as the
International
System of Units standard, declares 0° to be absolute zero, where no thermal
energy is present. William
Rankine, of ideal heat engine fame, combined Fahrenheit's scale with Kelvin's
absolute zero concept. Lastly, but not leastly,
René Antoine
Ferchault de Réaumur selected the freezing point of water to be 0° and the boiling
point to be 80°, primarily to accommodate his preference of alcohol over mercury
as a thermometer medium. There you have it - my version of the brief history of
temperature scales. Here is my webpage with
temperature unit conversions.
Temperature Conversion
Fig. 1 - Basic relationship among the live common temperature
scales in use.
By J. M. Bruning
There are five major temperature scales in use at present. These are: Fahrenheit,
Centigrade (Celsius), Kelvin (Absolute), Rankine, and Reaumur. The basic relationship
among these scales is shown in Fig. 1. Because measurements can be made in any of
these scales, conversion from one to the other can be performed by using the conversion
data shown in Table 1.
Table 1 - Conversion formulas among the various temperature scales.
Posted December 15, 2022
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