Irish Famine (1740–41) affect economies, energy sources, and politics. Although no barometric or temperature readings for Ireland survive from the Great Frost, a scattered few records survive from Englishmen who made personal readings. The mercury thermometer was invented 25 years earlier by the German pioneer Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit. Indoor values during January 1740 were as low as . The one outdoor reading that has survived was stated as "thirty-two degrees of frost." This did not include the effects of the wind chill factor, which would have been severe. This kind of weather was "quite outside the Irish experience," notes David Dickson, author of
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