Talk:Fahrenheit

Not sure how good an idea it is to have a disambiguation page here - have you looked at the multitude of pages that link here, all for the temperature scale meaning? Someone's going to have to fix all those links if this is to remain a disambiguation page. Mkweise 03:28 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

I agree and I'm moving it back. The graphics API is not at all famous enough to cause a reasonable ambiguity over the use of "Fahrenheit". --mav 03:51 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

Done. I gave the API a disambiguation block even though very few people will actually use it. --mav

while we're at it, there's Fahrenheit by Dior (kidding) -- Tarquin 10:44 Mar 7, 2003 (UTC)

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I removed this for now:

Other accounts assert that Fahrenheit's goal was to produce a scale where the coldest and warmest air temperature extremes in Europe would be zero and 100 degrees, respectively, because the scale was devised to measure air temperature moreso than for laboratory experiments. It follows that his choice of salt water's freezing/melting point and the healthy human body temperature were just convenient, stable, consistently measurable reference points that would always be near these values.

Some accounts go further and say that the scale was devised with each degree being the minimum change in air temperature that a human could perceive.

Checking three encyclopedias, the top Google hits and the Dictionary on Scientific Biography could not verify either claim. AxelBoldt 20:45 Mar 20, 2003 (UTC)

Both claims were in a middle school science textbook in the early 1980s. As punishment for talking in class and tipping my seat, I had to manually transcribe several pages from it, including one about the Fahrenheit scale. Of course, I don't have the textbook now, and am recalling it from memory. But before adding those paragraphs, I spent about an hour trudging through articles that I found through Google. It was surprising how little consensus there is among the stories of Mr. Fahrenheit. However, I did find a "verification" of the first claim (i.e, an article stating that the purpose of the scale is believed to have been for common air/water temperature measurement). I felt that it should still be phrased in a manner that clarifies that there's very little reference material to back up any of the claims. I'm not terribly attached to the phrases either way; I just thought they should be mentioned in a "some say, others disagree" kind of way before someone comes along and plops them in as indisputable fact.mjb 20:32 Mar 22, 2003 (UTC)