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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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temperature
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Britain has traditionally used the temperature scale introduced by Gabriel *Fahrenheit (1686–1736), a German physicist who lived most of his life in the Netherlands. He invented the mercury thermometer, more accurate than its predecessors, but devised an extremely elaborate system for its scale. For zero he chose the freezing point of salt water. He then divided the gap between this and blood temperature into 96 equal degrees (12 sections of 8). Having selected his two fixed points of frozen brine as 0° and human blood as 96°, he calculated that fresh water froze at 32° and that it boiled at 212° (strangely his findings were more accurate for water than for blood, which is closer to 98° than 96°).
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Britain adopted this first effective thermometric scale, and as a result it is still used in many countries which were once British colonies, including the USA. Anders *Celsius (1701–44), a Swedish astronomer only a few years younger than Fahrenheit, proposed the more convenient centigrade scale, with 100° separating the freezing and boiling points of water. Celsius is gradually replacing Fahrenheit in modern Britain.
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Britain's climate has a moderate temperature range. More than a few degrees below freezing seems exceptional in most parts of the country, as does a summer temperature above 30°C/86°F. The lowest officially recorded figure is – 27.2°C/– 17°F (oddly enough the same on two occasions a century apart in the same place, at Braemar in Scotland in 1895 and 1982), while the highest is 36.8°C/98.2°F in Kent and Surrey in 1911. But Britain's average temperature at sea level over an entire month is very rarely as low as freezing point or as high as 18°C/65°F.
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