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By the age of twenty-five, Fahrenheit was establishing himself as the leader in a continent-wide competition to invent and calibrate the world's first accurate thermometer, as well as the first standard scale to measure changes in temperature, a matter of vital importance to the growing world of science. He spent most of his professional life in the Netherlands, where he developed the world's most precise instruments to measure temperature. He also studied physics and established that water may remain liquid below its usual freezing point (32 degrees on his scale) and that the boiling point of liquids (most notably water) varies with  atmospheric pressure.

Fahrenheit proved to be a meticulous scientist as well as a brilliant instrument maker. First, he studied previous attempts to manufacture a reliable thermometer as early as those of Galileo (1592) and as recent to his time as Guillaume Amontons (1699), a French physicist and instrument inventor, deducing that the accuracy of their instruments was limited by the fact that their thermometers were exposed to the air, which distorted measurement of air temperature with the varying influenceof air pressure. He also studied the work of Ferdinando II de' Medici, who invented a closed thermometer in 1654.

Next, Fahrenheit turned to problems experienced during previous efforts to find a medium of measurement, usually water, alcohol, or both. Both water and alcohol produced vapors that distorted temperature readings, which varied with air pressure, even in a closed thermometer. In essence, a water-based thermometer functions also as a barometer, a device that measures air pressure. Water also did not expand or contract evenly enough to provide accurate readings as temperatures rose and fell. In addition, alcohol boiled at too low a temperature to make it a useful medium.

Fahrenheit was the first person to consider mercury as the best liquid to measure temperature in a closed thermometer. It expands and contracts evenly, freezes at a very low temperature (78 deg on his scale, or 38.72 on Celsius), and boils at a temperature that is relatively high (about 600 degrees on his scale, or 357 on Celsius). Mercury also produces very little vapor. Fahrenheit built closed-bulb devices using alcohol (1709) and mercury (1714). Mercury became the preferred medium despite its toxicity, and Fahrenheit's thermometers were state-of-the-art. He introduced cylindrical bulbs to replace spherical ones.

Many of his methods were withheld as trade secrets for several years after he began to use them. A number of stories have described how Fahrenheit devised his temperature scale, many of which are probably false. One says that he set zero as the coldest he observed in Gdansk. This is probably not true because most of Fahrenheit's work was done in the Netherlands.

Other stories say that Fahrenheit based his freezing point for water on the 32 degrees of enlightenment of the Freemasons. There is no evidence, however, that he practiced Freemasonry. Another story, also without documentary support, states that he believed a person would die of exposure to cold at 0 degree and of heatstroke at 100 degrees.

Fahrenheit also invented a constant-weight hydrometer of excellent design and a "thermobarometer" that could estimate barometric pressure from the boiling point of water. Fahrenheit observed phenomena as a scientist that many people today take for granted, such as the fact that a pure liquid boils at a fixed temperature, regardless of how much heat is applied beyond that point.

After 1717, Fahrenheit established a glassblowing shop in The Hague, where he manufactured barometers, altimeters, and thermometers. After 1718, he delivered chemistry lectures in Amsterdam. He was inducted into the Royal Society during a visit to London in 1724. Fahrenheit never married, and he died on September 16, 1736, at the age of fifty, of an unknown cause, probably in The Hague. He was buried there at the Kloosterkerk (Cloister Church).

Observation and measurement are key to the scientific method, and measurement with meaning is impossible without precise instruments. Science must be reproducible, and this is not possible without precisely measuring phenomena on a common scale, in a form that can be widely shared across languages and cultures. Fahrenheit's thermometers were invented at a time when scientists used several competing scales and instruments to measure temperature. By setting a worldwide scale and inventing instruments that calibrated it, Fahrenheit refined science in a fundamental way. Much of climate science, for example, would be impossible without accurate measurement of temperatures. Other daily activities, such as measurement of body temperature as an indicator of health, also rely on Fahrenheit's temperature scale and thermometer.

Fahrenheit's temperature scale remained in general use in most English-speaking countries until the 1970's. By that time, the centigrade (Celsius) scale, with 0 degree for the freezing point of water and 100 degrees for its boiling point, had taken its place in most other countries and accepted worldwide by scientists.

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