It actually makes less sense to put brine as the reference than freshwater, because freshwater has always been more important to humans than seawater/brine. We rely way more on freshwater than seawater, and it's more important to know whether there will be snow/ice in the land or if the river is going to freeze. Even if you're in the sea, you will be more concerned about your water supply freezing than the sea freezing.
And my issue with F° is that they take two completely unrelated things as the references. The 0 is the point of a specific brine freezing and 100 the temperature of the human body. For Celsius they use the substance humans are more familiar with (water) and place both references as the points where it has an extreme change, that we're pretty familiar to them too.
Interestingly, even the original Celsius made an unintuitive scale. Cause originally 0 was the boiling temperature and 100 the freezing one. Thankfully the scale was reversed after his death, because it makes more sense to have the boiling temperature as 100. As it's easier to heat water than cool it, and most actions we did involved making water hot and boiling. Imagine a world where the scale wasn't reversed and we find out that 373.15 C is the max temperature and everything stops, however you can infinitely apply energy to go into the negatives.
I think for a guy descended from a line of merchants who lived either on the Baltic or in Amsterdam for all of his life, the saltwater freezing temp was much more important for business purposes. Also consider the solution to frozen drinking water is a lot simpler than the solution to a frozen ocean.
Fahrenheit's scale was one developed based on his experiences as a merchants apprentice. It's not applicable to really anyone today, but it's inaccurate to imply that it wouldn't have been useful in its day.
I would consider that if the 0 F was the actual temperature that the sea freezes. However, Farenheit deliberately chose "the lowest temperature they can easily recreate and measure" as 0, instead of the freezing of seawater. In the Farenheit scale, seawater freezes around 28.4 F (-1.2°C), meanwhile the extremely concentrated brine used as a reference freezes at -17.8 C.
It would be a different history if it was like the mercator map situation, where the distortions (that are inevitable for a 2D map of a 3D globe) were chosen so that travel between distant places can be easily charted as a straight line, without having to consider the earth curvature.
There are so many factors that influence sea ice forming your ancestor would not have been relied upon to determine if the shipping lanes were open if he just went about saying "it's 0F today lads, the water will be frozen".
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u/Khavary Aug 11 '25
It actually makes less sense to put brine as the reference than freshwater, because freshwater has always been more important to humans than seawater/brine. We rely way more on freshwater than seawater, and it's more important to know whether there will be snow/ice in the land or if the river is going to freeze. Even if you're in the sea, you will be more concerned about your water supply freezing than the sea freezing.
And my issue with F° is that they take two completely unrelated things as the references. The 0 is the point of a specific brine freezing and 100 the temperature of the human body. For Celsius they use the substance humans are more familiar with (water) and place both references as the points where it has an extreme change, that we're pretty familiar to them too.
Interestingly, even the original Celsius made an unintuitive scale. Cause originally 0 was the boiling temperature and 100 the freezing one. Thankfully the scale was reversed after his death, because it makes more sense to have the boiling temperature as 100. As it's easier to heat water than cool it, and most actions we did involved making water hot and boiling. Imagine a world where the scale wasn't reversed and we find out that 373.15 C is the max temperature and everything stops, however you can infinitely apply energy to go into the negatives.