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
Beckmann thermometer (R on diagram) at the upper end of the tube, by means of which the quantity of mercury in the bulb can be increased or diminished so that the instrument can be set to measure temperature differences at either high or low temperature values. In contrast, the range of a typical mercury-in-glass thermometer is fixed, being set by the calibration marks etched on the glass or the marks on the printed scale. In setting the thermometer, a sufficient amount of mercury must be left in the bulb and stem to give readings between the required temperatures. First, the thermometer is