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Show lion' 'zeuc was Auorrai. PAIIBEVUFIT DlSCOVrjlED, AS UK TIIOCUI1T, THE EVTBKUK VI' COLD AND AilKD IT. "Zero" i the part of every thermometer ther-mometer that is most watched and dreaded in this changeable climate of cum. The word is fro-n the Spanish, and means empty, hence nothing. It was first used on a thermometer ther-mometer in 1709 by a Prussian merchant mer-chant named Fahrenheit. From a boy be wa3 a close ob-serverof ob-serverof nature, and when only 10 years old, in the remarkably cold winter of 1709, he experimented by puttingsnowaudsalt together and noticed that it produced a degree of cold equal to the coldest day of the year. And that day w& the coldest day that the oldest inhabitant could remember. re-member. Gabriel was the more struck with the coincidence of his little scientific,dUcovery,aud hastily concluded that he ha- found the lowett degree of temperature known In the world either natural or artificial. arti-ficial. He called the degree zero, and constructed a thermomtter, or rude weather glass, with a scale gradual-I gradual-I Ing up from zero to lulling IIut, wtiich he numbered 12, and the t freezing point 32, because, a) he thought, mercury contracted the thirty-second of its volume on being cooled down from tho temperature of freezing water t zero, and expanded ex-panded one hundred an eightieth on being heated from the freezing to thebolliug point. Time feboned that the arrangement arrange-ment instead of being truly scientific scien-tific was as arbitrary as the division of the Bible into verses and chapters; and these two. points no more represented repre-sented the real extremes of ten)era-ture ten)era-ture than from "Dan to Beersheba" expressed the exact extremes of Palestine. Bat Fahrenheit's thermometer had been widely adopted, with its i inconvenient scale, and none , thought of any bttler until bis name i became an authority, for Fahren- 1 1'eit finally abandoned trade and I gave himself up to science. Then I habit made people cling to the es- , tablifrbed scale, as habit made the I English cling tj the old system of cumbrous fractional money. The three countries which use Fahrenheit are Euglind, Holland and America Rusiaand Germany I uc Reaumur's thermemeterinwhich the boiling point is counted 60 degs. Iatiove the freezing point. France uses tho centigrade thermometer, so called because it makes the boiling boil-ing point 103 des. from freezing point. On many accounts the centigrade system is the best, and the triumph of convenience will be attained I when zero Is made the freezing point, and when the boiling point is put 100 or 1000 degs. from it, and all I the subdivisions are fixed deci- Imally. If Fahrenheit had done this at first, or eVU if he had made it one of his many Improvements after the I public adopted his error, the luck of j opportunity, whlili was really hi, I' would have secured to his invention the patronage of the world. Ae:r Yuri. World. |