At extremely rare intervals the thermometer has fallen below zero (- 18 ° C ), as was the case in the remarkable cold wave of the 12th-13 February 1899, when an absolute minimum of-17 ° F (- 29 ° C ) was registered at Valley Head.

The question whether there is a limit to the degree of cold possible, and, if so, where the zero must be placed, was first addressed by the French physicist Guillaume Amontons in 1702, in connection with his improvements in the air thermometer.

Amontons therefore argued that the zero of his thermometer would be that temperature at which the spring of the air in it was reduced to nothing.

His thermometer was calibrated with a value of 100 ° for the freezing point of water and 0 ° for the boiling point.

For years it was simply referred to as the Swedish thermometer.

Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit ( 24 May 1686 – 16 September 1736 ) was a Dutch-German-Polish physicist, engineer, and glass blower who is best known for inventing the alcohol thermometer ( 1709 ) and the mercury thermometer ( 1714 ), and for developing a temperature scale now named after him.

The thermometer then was placed into the mixture and the liquid in the thermometer allowed to descend to its lowest point.

The second reference point was selected as the reading of the thermometer when it was placed in still water when ice was just forming on the surface.

" When Groucho himself was on his deathbed, and a nurse came around with a thermometer, explaining that she wanted to see if he had a temperature, he responded, " Don't be silly — everybody has a temperature.

The first clear diagram of a thermoscope was published in 1617 by Giuseppe Biancani: the first showing a scale and thus constituting a thermometer was by Robert Fludd in 1638.

However, each inventor and each thermometer was unique — there was no standard scale.

That is, the thermometer did not hold the temperature after it was moved to a place with a different temperature.

If the non-registering thermometer was removed from the hot liquid, then the temperature indicated on the thermometer would immediately begin changing to reflect the temperature of its new conditions ( in this case, the air temperature ).

The first registering thermometer was designed and built by James Six in 1782, and the design, known as Six's thermometer is still in wide use today.

The traditional method of putting a scale on a liquid-in-glass or liquid-in-metal thermometer was in three stages:

In the study of the quark-gluon plasma through heavy-ion collisions, single particle spectra sometimes serve as a thermometer.

Various authors have credited the invention of the thermometer to Cornelis Drebbel, Robert Fludd, Galileo Galilei or Santorio Santorio.

Leslie's main contributions to physics were made by the help of the differential thermometer, an instrument whose invention was contested with him by Count Rumford.

Allbutt's invention of the clinical thermometer was widely welcomed because, beforehand, patients were required to hold a one-foot-long thermometer in their hands which took about twenty minutes for an acceptable measurement to be taken of their body temperature.

The day having been cloudy with occasional showers, these islands at all times dreary enough, looked particularly so on our first view of them, the shores of sound, steep, with bare hills intersected with ravines rising from them, these hills without a tree and the clouds hanging low, gave them exactly the appearance of the Cheviots or a Scotch moor on a winter's day and considering we were in the May of these latitudes, the first impression of the climate was not favourable, the weather however, was not called, the thermometer was 63 degrees which is Howick mid-summer temperature.

The measured globe temperature depends on both convection and radiation transfer, however by effectively increasing the size of the thermometer bulb the convection transfer coefficient is reduced and the effect of radiation is proportionally increased.

The development of today's thermometers and temperature scales began in the early 18th century, when Gabriel Fahrenheit adapted a thermometer using mercury and a scale both developed by Ole Christensen Rømer.

John Harrison, in the course of his development of the marine chronometer, solved the problem by a " compensation curb " – essentially a bimetallic thermometer which adjusted the effective length of the balance spring as a function of temperature.

The Bureau is pursuing an active program to provide a temperature scale and thermometer calibration services in the range 1.5 to 20 Af.

Such an interferometer provides a means of absolute temperature measurement, and may be used as an alternative to the gas thermometer.

Several germanium resistors have been thermally cycled from 300 to 4.2 Af and their resistances have been found to be reproducible within 1/3 millidegree when temperatures were derived from a vapor pressure thermometer whose tubing is jacketed through most of the liquid helium.

It has also been observed, in helium 2, that large discrepancies can exist between surface vapor pressures and those pressures measured by a vapor pressure thermometer.

This has been attributed to helium film flow in the vapor pressure thermometer.

In this case also the design of the thermometer can be modified to reduce the helium film flow.

For roasts, insert meat thermometer diagonally so it does not rest on bone.

Also make sure thermometer does not touch the revolving spit or hit the coals.

The machine shall contain an opening for the insertion of a thermometer or other equivalent equipment for determining the temperature of the water during the washing and rinsing procedures.

already the thermometer stood close to ninety.

The average winter minimum for the entire state is 35 ° F ( 2 ° C ), and there is an average of 35 days in each year in which the thermometer falls below the freezing-point.

A standard example is a Resistance thermometer.

Example: the actual temperature is 23. 234456544453 degrees but if only two digits ( 23 ) are assigned to this parameter in a particular digital representation ( e. g. digital thermometer or table in a printed report ) the quantizing error is: 0. 234456544453.

The town was about what Wilson expected: one main street with its rows of false-fronted buildings, a water tower, a few warehouses, a single hotel ; ;

The mere fact that the tall figure with the rifle and field glasses had been seen riding that way was enough to frighten three rustling homesteaders out of the Upper Laramie country in a single week.

This arrangement was for Copernicus literally monstrous: `` With ( the Ptolemaists ) it is as though an artist were to gather the hands, feet, head and other members for his images from divers models, each part excellently drawn, but not related to a single body ; ;

If Robinson was a liar and a slanderer, he was also a very canny gentleman, for nothing that Pike could do would pry so much as a single word out of him.

However, in this case as elsewhere it was necessary to arrive at a single standard to be applied to all situations, representing an averaging of conditions, and thus to fix particular points in time which would be considered the dividing points between daytime and nighttime conditions.

Thus was invented the single thread sewing machine, which Mr. Gibbs in partnership with Mr. Willcox decided to bring to Brown & Sharpe with the proposal that the small company undertake its manufacture.

A single value of the thermal relaxation time Af at room temperature was measured by the progressive saturation method.

A single measurement of the spin - spin relaxation time Af was obtained at 10 Mc/sec by pulse methods.

The choice of the single member district was dictated to a certain extent by problems of communication and understanding in the more remote areas of the country, but it also served to minimize the national political value of the elections.

In order to be able to properly relate the data for a single company each of the three cards comprising the set for each firm was identified with the appropriate serial number of the respondent.

It was concluded that it would be appropriate to process the two groups of responses as a single sample of all small businesses engaged in, or wishing to sell to, defense programs.

A small single switchboard was installed in the Village over Woodcock's hardware store ( later E. H. Hemenway's ).

But not a single human life was lost, and property damage in the Hawaiian Islands did not exceed $800,000.

She knew also that I was unmarried and without a single known relative.

A single automobile was parked half-way up the block on the left-hand side.

Lemon was on with his fourth single of the game, a liner to center.

Turk Lown was tagged with the loss, his second against no victories, while Ray Moore won his second game against a single loss.

Now all he had to do was finish in even par to collect the trophy and the biggest single paycheck in golf.

On display were 343 first-class paintings and sculptures from his fabled collection -- and every single one of them was up for sale.

The D Minor Sonata, Op. 31 No. 2, introduced by dynamically shaped arpeggios, was most engaging in its moments of quasi-recitative -- single lines in which the fingers seemed to be feeling their way toward the idea to come.

The single largest organization of Anthropologists is the American Anthropological Association ( AAA ), which was founded in 1903.

Early anthropology was divided between proponents of unilinealism, who argued that all societies passed through a single evolutionary process, from the most primitive to the most advanced, and various forms of non-lineal theorists, who tended to subscribe to ideas such as diffusionism.

This central charge would thus be approximately half the atomic weight ( though it was almost 25 % off the figure for the atomic number in gold ( Z = 79, A = 197 ), the single element from which Rutherford made his guess ).

This was the case, for instance, in the Weapon Shop series, the Mixed Men series and in single stories such as " Heir Apparent ", whose protagonist was described as a " benevolent dictator ".