Meteorological instrumentation rain gauge. In 1714, Gabriel Fahrenheit creates a reliable scale for measuring temperature with a mercury-type thermometer. In 1742, Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer, proposed the 'centigrade' temperature scale, the predecessor of the current Celsius scale. In 1783, the first hair hygrometer is demonstrated by Horace-Bénédict de Saussure. In 1806, Francis Beaufort introduced his system for classifying wind speeds. The April 1960 launch of the first successful weather satellite, TIROS-1, marked the beginning of the age where weather information became available globally. This was also used to measure the temperature of the surrounding air. A thermometer measures air temperature, or
Celsius and various publishing houses, may follow different typographical rules. Unicode provides the Celsius symbol at code point . However, this is a compatibility character provided for roundtrip compatibility with legacy encodings. It easily allows correct rendering for vertically written East Asian scripts, such as Chinese. The Unicode standard explicitly discourages the use of this character: "In normal use, it is better to represent degrees Celsius "°C" with a sequence of + , rather than . For searching, treat these two sequences as identical." Shown below is the degree Celsius character followed immediately by the two-component version: When viewed on computers