Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit divisible into many fractions. It is because of the scale's redefinition that normal body temperature today is taken as 98.6 degrees, whereas it was 96 degrees on Fahrenheit's original scale. The Fahrenheit scale was the primary temperature standard for climatic, industrial and medical purposes in English-speaking countries until the 1970s, nowadays replaced by the Celsius scale long used in the rest of the world. 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
Thermometer thermometer. It is described as having a bulb at the bottom of a sealed tube partially filled with brandy. The tube has a numbered scale. Delmedigo does not claim to have invented this instrument, nor does he name anyone else as its inventor. In about 1654 Ferdinando II de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany (1610–1670), actually produced such an instrument, the first modern-style thermometer, dependent on the expansion of a liquid, and independent of air pressure. Many other scientists experimented with various liquids and designs of thermometer. However, each inventor and each thermometer was unique—there was no standard scale. In