Living creatures need to respond to their environment to survive. Many plants turn their leaves or grow in a direction that optimizes their collection of sunlight. Humans have a variety of detectors such as eyes, ears, taste buds, and skin nerves to detect features of our environment. We are all familiar with hot and cold because of nerve sensors which detect the gain or loss of heat from our skin. There are many aspects of our environment that our senses either crudely detect, or do not detect at all. Humans can learn from what we detect and modify portions of our environment assist us. But the measure of the degree of hotness or coldness resulted in instruments and definitions which some people find confusing.
The practical need to develop a means of measuring ceramics cooked in kilns led to devices which measure what became defined as temperature. Generally objects expand when they are heated and contract when cooled. But different materials have different rates of expansion. By comparing the expansion of two different materials, thermometers were invented as a measure of temperature.
The first commonly used temperature scales were devised to measure the weather. In 1701, the Danish Ole Christensen Rømer (b1644, d1710, portrait right→) created one of the first practical thermometers using red wine in a glass container. Rømer created a temperature scale with the temperature of a salt and ice mixture numbered zero and the boiling point of water numbered as 60.
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (b1686, d1736, ←portrait at left) devoted most of his life to creating precision meteorological instruments in Amsterdam. After meeting Rømer in Copenhagen, Fahrenheit introduced using mercury in a glass thermometer in 1714. Fahrenheit thought it would be practical to use a scale in which 0 corresponded with the coldest temperature normally encountered and 100 corresponded to the hottest temperature. Fahrenheit, being an instrument manufacturer realized the importance of not only choosing two easily obtainable calibration temperatures, but a scale which could be marked by repeated division of the space between the calibration temperatures. He initially used a mixture of salt and ice as 0 and the temperature of the human body (held in the mouth or under the armpit of a living man in good health
) a value of 96. (One degree is obtained by dividing the separation in half 5 times, and by three once.) Fahrenheit later increased the range of his temperature scale by assigning boiling point of water a value of 212.
Réne Antoine Ferchault de Réamur (b1683, d1757) created in 1731 a scale in which 0 represented the freezing point of water and 80 represented its boiling point. The Réamur temperature scale became popular in France.
In 1742, Swedish Anders Celsius (b1701, d1744, ←portrait at left) created an inverted centigrade temperature scale in which 0 represented the boiling point of water and 100 represented the freezing point. Two years later Carl Linnaeus (b1707, d1778) suggested reversing Celsius' temperature scale so that 0 represented the freezing point of water and 100 represented its boiling point. The centigrade scale was adopted largely because of a paper by Celsius, Observations on two persistent degrees on a thermometer, suggesting the importance of reliable calibration temperatures, and reported on experiments showing that the freezing point of water is independent of latitude and atmospheric pressure. Celsius also determined the dependence of the boiling of water on atmospheric pressure, and gave a rule for the determination of the boiling point if the barometric pressure deviates from a standard pressure. As a result the centigrade temperature scale gradually became popular throughout the world. The units of the centigrade temperature scale were designated degree centigrade (°C).
Over a century later, William Thomson (Baron Kelvin of Largs, Lord Kelvin of Scotland, b1824, d1907, photograph right→) proposed in 1848 a thermodynamic temperature scale which assigned 0 to thermodynamic absolute zero and used a unit size equal to one degree centigrade. His scale was later named the Kelvin scale (°K).
Creating a similar absolute temperature scale to accompany the them more common Fahrenheit scale, William John Macquorn Rankine (b1820, d1872) proposed in 1859 a scale with 0 as absolute zero, but used the Fahrenheit degree for its unit size. This Rankine scale is denoted by the symbol °R.
In 1948, the Ninth General Conference on Weights and Measures rename centigrade scale to Celsius (°C) in honor of Anders Celsius. In 1954, the Tenth General Conference on Weights and Measures selected the degree Kelvin as the metric unit of thermodynamic temperature. The conference defined the degree Kelvin by assigning the exact value 273.16°K to the triple point of water (where gas, liquid, and solid phases may coexist in thermodynamic equilibrium). In 1967, the Thirteenth General Conference on Weights and Measures simplified degree Kelvin (°K) to just Kelvin (K). The conference redefined Celsius temperature as the thermodynamic temperature minus 273.15 Kelvin.
Knowing how to measure something isn't a guarantee that you have even a foggy notion of what is being measured! While temperature seemed related to what we feel as warm or cold, the cause of that warmth or cold remained obscure until a careful Newtonian analysis of atomic theory. And that required some confidence that this chemistry actually described reality. Recall that chemistry evolved out of the secret witchcraft of Persian, Arab, and Egyptian alchemists rather than the observations, mathematics and Greek logic used by physics. Until the 1905 analysis of Brownian motion by Albert Einstein, some prominent physicists regarded atoms as a chemist's unsupported fantasy. But by the middle of the 19th Century, some physicists began consideration of the physical implications of what became known as the kinetic molecular theory (= theory of moving collections of atoms).
The kinetic molecular theory was originated and developed by Robert Boyle (b 1627, d1691), Daniel Bernoulli (b1700, d1782), James Joule (b1818, d1889), A. Kronig (b1822, d1879), Rudolph Clausius (b1822, d1888), and Clerk Maxwell (b1831, d1879). Absolute temperature in a gas, T, was experimentally found to be related to the gas pressure, p, volume, V, and number of molecules, n, (R is a constant required by the arbitrary choice of units) by
J. Willard Gibbs (b1839, d1903, ←photo at left) and Ludwig Boltzmann (b1844, d1906, photo at left→) helped create statistical mechanics which included thermodynamics explaining such properties as temperature. They assumed that pressure is due to the change of momenta of molecules striking the container walls. Since molecules are randomly moving in three dimensions, the calculation combined the time between collisions (determined by 1/3 of the root mean-square speed), and momenta change (twice the average speed times the total mass given by n times molecule mass, M).
We have discovered or created a variety of devices that respond to variations in temperature that can be adapted to observe and measure temperature.
Most materials expand to larger size when they get warmer. A liquid with a large rate of expansion can be placed in a container with a low rate of expansion such as glass. The top surface (meniscus) will rise in the container as the materials warms. The change can be exaggerated by using more liquid but having a very narrow neck on the container.
A scale can be marked on the neck to allow measurements that can be compared with those from other locations and times. One such scale marks zero at the temperature of melting ice, and 100 at the temperature of boiling water. This was once called the Centigrade scale, but has been renamed the Celsius scale in honor of .... Celsius.
Some layered semiconductor crystals allow small amounts of electrical current to flow. This electricity can be measured as the current flow (Amperage) or the energy driving the flow (Voltage).
We can gain assurance of the value of our devices by comparing the results of one device that the results from a different device. This calibration
process is particularly valuable for making a new device able to provide measurements that use a scale familiar to us.
Information can be displaced in several ways. Text narrative is useful for describing procedure so others could duplicate what you did. But narratives are not very useful for noting changes in information or discovering patterns. Usually it is more useful to record a series of measurements in a table. Columns can be labeled with repetitious information such as which device provided the information and the scale units (such as °C, °F, seconds or Volts). Rows can be used to collect related measurements such as from different devices while they were at the same temperature.
A graph is a visual way to present measurements (called data) that both reveals patterns and facilitates finding mathematical equations that precisely describe patterns. This process is called curve fitting.
Computers can assist both the collection of measurements and the display and analysis of the information. There are a variety of devices from companies like Vernier, MicroLAB, Pasco, and Texas Instruments that can collect information from a variety of electronic sensors. They may immediately relay information to a more capable computer, or allow transfer late. Vernier, MicroLAB, and offer computer software that are specialized for graphing and analyzing the data. Microsoft and other companies offer business programs such as Excel that will graph and analyze data. Because these are designed for business uses such are quarterly reports, they generally use default settings that are more cumbersome and need to be changed for this type of data. (See directions on graphing.)
Hopefully by the time you read this you realize that there are a great many investigations which can be done involving temperature measurement. The above only give a few suggestions to encourage you to be creative and to formulate your own investigation. In all situations, be sure to consider the hazards which may be involved in your investigation and take precautions to assure safety.
Communicating technical information such as observations and findings is a skill used by scientists but useful for most others. If you need course credit, use your observations in your journal to construct a formal report.
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