Page "Fahrenheit" Paragraph 6

According to a letter Fahrenheit wrote to his friend Herman Boerhaave, his scale was built on the work of Ole Rømer, whom he had met earlier.

In Rømer's scale, brine freezes at zero, water freezes and melts at 7. 5 degrees, body temperature is 22. 5, and water boils at 60 degrees.

Fahrenheit multiplied each value by four in order to eliminate fractions and increase the granularity of the scale.

He then re-calibrated his scale using the melting point of ice and normal human body temperature ( which were at 30 and 90 degrees ); he adjusted the scale so that the melting point of ice would be 32 degrees and body temperature 96 degrees, so that 64 intervals would separate the two, allowing him to mark degree lines on his instruments by simply bisecting the interval six times ( since 64 is 2 to the sixth power ).