Thermometer 1665 Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) suggested using the melting and boiling points of water as standards, and in 1694 Carlo Renaldini (1615–1698) proposed using them as fixed points on a universal scale. In 1701, Isaac Newton (1642–1726/27) proposed a scale of 12 degrees between the melting point of ice and body temperature. In 1714 Dutch scientist and inventor Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit invented the first reliable thermometer, using mercury instead of alcohol and water mixtures. In 1724 he proposed a temperature scale which now (slightly adjusted) bears his name. He could do this because he manufactured thermometers, using mercury (which has a
Thermometer of the thermometer, what he produced were thermoscopes. The first clear diagram of a thermoscope was published in 1617 by Giuseppe Biancani (1566 – 1624): the first showing a scale and thus constituting a thermometer was by Robert Fludd in 1638. This was a vertical tube, closed by a bulb of air at the top, with the lower end opening into a vessel of water. The water level in the tube is controlled by the expansion and contraction of the air, so it is what we would now call an air thermometer. The first person to put a scale on