Almanac: Anders Celsius

And now a page from our “Sunday Morning” Almanac: November 27th, 1701, 315 years ago today … the birthday of the Swedish scientist Anders Celsius.

Celsius is best-known for the temperature scale that bears his name.

Unlike his predecessor, Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit -- whose scale had water freezing at 32 degrees and boiling at 212 -- Anders Celsius separated boiling and freezing by exactly 100 degrees.

• Almanac: Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (“Sunday Morning,” 05/24/15)
  

However, for some reason, he marked the degrees on his original thermometer upside down -- with ZERO as the boiling point, and ONE HUNDRED as the freezing point! Go figure.

The Celsius scale was soon flipped right-side up, with zero for freezing and 100 for boiling.

And generations of American schoolkids have been figuring out how to convert Fahrenheit to Celsius and vice versa ever since.

Today the United States stands alone among the major industrial nations in still using Fahrenheit.

And based on the apparent degree of resistance across the land to a switch to Celsius, it seems unlikely we’ll be warming to the idea any time soon.