Medical thermometer Bahamas, Belize, and the Cayman Islands. Prominent Dutch mathematician, astronomer and physicist Christiaan Huygens created a clinical thermometer in 1665, to which he added an early form of the centigrade scale by setting the scale to the freezing and boiling points of water. By 1742 Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius created the Celsius temperature scale that was the reverse of the modern scale, in that "0" was the boiling point of water, while "100" was freezing. It would later be reversed by Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus (1707–1778) in 1744. Working independently of Celsius, the Lyonnais physicist Jean-Pierre Christin, permanent secretary of
Introduction to the metric system volt and farad in honour of Georg Ohm, Alessandro Volta and Michael Faraday respectively. This proposal had the support of William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) who had been instrumental in forming the Committee of Electrical Standards of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. The use of scientists' names for such units was subsequently extended to other units, including the watt named after James Watt and the degree Celsius named after Anders Celsius. Historically, individual units evolved which were based on the size and context of what was being measured. These units could avoid the need to use large numbers