XPost: rec.arts.drwho, alt.usage.english
From: nospam@de-ster.demon.nl
Peter Moylan wrote:
> On 26/12/25 23:28, The True Melissa wrote:
> > I've added alt.usage.english to the newsgroups line. In article
> > <10ill45$2hrgc$1@dont-email.me>, daniel47 @nomail.afraid.org says...
>
> >> Could that 'two names' thing be an "England v the rest of the
> >> World" thing?? i.e. the real name is 'Celsius' but England uses
> >> 'Centigrade' (or vice versa)??
> >
> > Come to think of it, I haven't heard anyone speak of Centigrade in a
> > while. I'm in the US, and people here say "Celsius" now, but I heard
> > "Centigrade" fairly often in the 70s, maybe early 80s.
>
> Centigrade is a description rather than a name. It means there are a
> hundred degrees between calibration points. Fahrenheit was originally a
> centigrade scale, with zero degrees defined as the freezing point of a
> certain kind of salty water, and 100 degrees defined as the human body
> temperature. Of course it has since been redefined with more accurate
> calibration rules.
Not really. Fahrenheit was a digital scale.
He used 0 degrees for the lowest temperature he could achieve,
and set the freezing point of water at 32 degrees.
This had the advantage that he could easily obtain a degree scale
by repeated divisions in half.
Body temperature being somewhere near 100 degrees
was a happy coincidence.
(it is too variable to calibrate anything on)
> The scale that essentially all of the civilised world now uses is
> Celsius. In my younger days a lot of people did call it Centigrade, but
> that name has now dropped out of use.
(Techincality mode on)
The world really uses Kelvin, but they call it degrees Celsius,
(after subtracting about 273.15)
The differences are small, but they matter for precision work,
Jan
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