Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit

Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686 to 1736) was a physicist, inventor and maker of scientific instruments. Born in Poland to a family of German origin, he spent much of his working life in the Dutch Republic, where he built precision instruments for natural philosophers. His lasting contribution to technology is the thermometer. He improved both the design and the manufacture of thermometers so that readings taken by different observers with their own Fahrenheit instruments could be compared reliably. He is also credited with the first successful mercury-in-glass thermometers, which proved more accurate than the older spirit-filled instruments and had a generally better design. The popularity of these instruments led to wide adoption of the temperature scale supplied with them, which still carries his name. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. In this atlas he is treated as an instrument engineer whose craft standards made temperature measurement repeatable; his work as a physicist belongs to the Science Atlas.