Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit FRS (; ; 24 May 1686 – 16 September 1736) was a Dutch-German-Polish physicist, inventor, and scientific instrument maker. Fahrenheit was born in Danzig/Gdańsk, a predominantly German-speaking Hanseatic city in the Pomeranian Voivodeship of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, but lived most of his life in the Dutch Republic (1701–1736) and was one of the notable figures in the Golden Age of Dutch science and technology. A pioneer of exact thermometry, he helped lay the foundations for the era of precision thermometry by inventing the mercury-in-glass thermometer (first practical, accurate thermometer) and Fahrenheit scale (first standardized
Medical thermometer Medical thermometer A medical thermometer (also called clinical thermometer) is used for measuring human or animal body temperature. The tip of the thermometer is inserted into the mouth under the tongue ("oral" or "sub-lingual temperature"), under the armpit ("axillary temperature"), or into the rectum via the anus ("rectal temperature"). The medical thermometer began as an instrument more appropriately called a water thermoscope, constructed by Galileo Galilei circa 1592–1593. It lacked an accurate scale with which to measure temperature and could be affected by changes in atmospheric pressure. Italian physician Santorio Santorio is the first known individual to have put a