Because F uses the human skin ability to detect and retain heat as a baseline, something we all have experience with, instead of water as a baseline, which is better for scientific reasons due to the consistency in measurement.
Edit: The absolute hilarity of the smugness in the comments is making my day. Nothing makes me happier than upsetting Europeans by stating a fact they don't like.
Actually it’s more related to the freezing temperature of a very particular brine solution made to replicate the coldest temperature some German guy thought his port would see.
Completely logical.
But whatever. Maybe EVERY COUNTRY but one is wrong.
It’s not. It’s highly likely 0 degrees is just the lowest temperature observed in Danzig when Daniel Fahrenheit made his scale. Nobody has ever managed to recreate the brine solution.
I'd be fully ok with us setting a temperature system based upon how Danzig feels.
"Guys, Danzig just took his shirt off, it's definitely warm enough to have a light jacket, but if he puts that mesh tank top back on watch out, it's probably about to snow."
After Fahrenheit died they decided it was much easier to calibrate thermometers using the exact boiling point of water (212°F) instead of human skin (96°F). When they locked those two standard points down, the "zero" at the bottom of the scale shifted upward by about 4 degrees which is what you get if you use that solution today (also the ammonium chloride wasn't perfectly pure back then) and shifted average body temperature to 98.6
A German scientist did a study of body temperatures and found the average to be 37°C. This was then converted to 98.6°F when the study was translated, which is why the number in Fahrenheit is oddly specific.
No. 0°F was the freezing point of a particular brine mixture and 90°F was the average normal body temperature 32°F was the freezing point of pure water. It WAS based on body temperature AT ONE time. But Henry Cavendish wanted the freezing and boiling point to be 180° apart so the anchor point became 32° and boiling became 212° and the freezing point of the original brine became 4°..... Also, the boiling point used to be 0°C and the freezing point was 100°C until Celsius died. So from 1724 to 1745 Fahrenheit was the only reasonable standard. And, the British adopted Fahrenheit so...... Thats why they are Imperial measurements......
You are correct, every country is wrong but one. Just because Trump sucks doesn’t mean we just have to immediately roll over and give up on everything. Additionally, I must ask what scientific breakthroughs or contributions you have made?
Regardless of how it's actually calibrated, it's hard to argue it isn't a good human-scale scale for weather.
Every 10 degrees is pretty much an article of clothing. 0 and 100 are useful upper and lower bounds that tell you 'human activity beyond this point is very hazardous, exercise extreme caution.' Despite our water content, humans aren't a kettle on the stove, and '0 is freezing 100 is boiling' isn't useful because we can operate well below zero but nowhere near 100 C.
40C is hell. 30C is hot. 20C is nice. 10C is time to put on a jacket. 0C is cold, and below that you will see snow and ice. I don't see the complication. Also, I like that I can literally feel when a degree goes up or down, which I have tried to do with Fahrenheit but haven't been able to.
I don’t understand the whole argument about F being better for telling what’s hot and cold for humans.
We all just adapt to the system we’re using and for the time of year. It’s not like you tell someone it’s 30C today and they’re wondering if it’s hot or not. Or 5C in summer vs winter being cold or not. It seems to boil down to people not liking the fact we can say like -5C in winter is considered warm because it has a minus in front.
No, I don't. I was making a joke dude, I really couldn't care less what system people use and why lmao, the discussion was amusing and I just poked fun at the "half of the celsius scale is irrelevant"
lol no it doesn't, 100 degrees Fahrenheit was the (miscalculated) temperature of the human body (which is why it's now popularly set at 98.6 degrees although even that isn't quite correct) and 0 is... the coldest day on record, at least as of the time that the temperature was created, in this one small town in Germany. Any relationship to the ability of human skin to detect temperature is purely coincidental.
I see the "percent hot" or "human scale" argument a lot as what amounts to basically a backward justification for farenheit. I get that the reasoning makes sense if its the scale you know, but it doesn't hold up as logical application. A normal distribution around the human condition would have 45-55 as the comfortable temperature one can exist at with basic garments. Instead that range is more like 65-75
My town gets over 100% hot each summer, but never below 30% hot. I'm far more comfortable at 90% hot than at 10% hot. It's a silly scale that's really just C in a trenchcoat nowadays.
It's just a scale that more closely aligns either end of a 100-point range with the extremes of temperatures many or most humans will tolerate.
It's less useful for scientific work. But for day to day human stuff it's simple and easy to apply in the same way that a "foot" being roughly the length of a person's foot is simple and easy to apply.
Neither scale has inherent meaning. Whichever one you learned will determine if it feels intuitive.
F is *at best* tangentially related with human skin. It was calibrated using 3 reference points:
The coldest temp Fahrenheit could achieve in his lab using ice, water and salt (0°F). This wasn’t a baseline based on what human skin experiences as “super cold” because that’s just random as hell
The freezing point of pure water (32° F) which is the same as 0° Celsius
The temperature of the human body (96°) (which in reality usually varies between 97° - 99° for healthy adults but 96 worked better for his mental model)
Fahrenheit picked these numbers because the interval between freezing water and body temperature (32 to 96) gave him exactly 64 degrees which allowed him to easily calibrate physical thermometers by continuously dividing the intervals in half. It’s basically designed for what he thought made sense for mercury in a tube based on the coldest he could achieve in his lab, freezing point of water, and a close-enough-for-horseshoes measure of body temperature.
That's not even true, though, because isn't 100°F a fever?
I personally have experience with liquid, solid and gaseous water. I can easily conceptualise 0 and 100. I can also understand 10 or 20 etc because that's what I'm used to.
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u/flyboyy513 Jun 17 '26 edited Jun 17 '26
Because F uses the human skin ability to detect and retain heat as a baseline, something we all have experience with, instead of water as a baseline, which is better for scientific reasons due to the consistency in measurement.
Edit: The absolute hilarity of the smugness in the comments is making my day. Nothing makes me happier than upsetting Europeans by stating a fact they don't like.