On This Day In History: Anders Celsius, Swedish Astronomer And Mathematician Was Born – On Nov 27, 1701

MessageToEagle.com – On November 27, 1701, Anders Celsius, a Swedish astronomer, physicist and mathematician (1701-1744) was born.

He invented the centigrade (Celsius) temperature scale commonly used in Europe and founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1740, the oldest astronomical observatory in Sweden.

Born in Uppsala, Sweden, Anders Celsius was raised a Lutheran family. His father, Nils Celsius, was an astronomy professor and Anders Celsius was early interested in science, especially mathematics. He studied at Uppsala University where, like his father, he joined as a professor of astronomy in 1730.

He made many contributions to science. In 1730, Celsius published ‘New Method for Determining the Distance from the Earth to the Sun’.

He also studied auroral phenomena and was the first to propose a connection between the aurora borealis and changes in the magnetic field of the Earth. At Nuremberg in 1733, he published a collection of 316 observations of the aurora borealis made by himself and others over the period 1716–1732.

Celsius visited several, famous European astronomyical observatories from 1732 to 1734, including Germany, Italy and France.

In Paris, he supported the importance of the measurement of an arc of the meridian in Lapland, the northernmost part of Sweden, and two years later, in 1736, he joined the expedition organized for that purpose and led by the French mathematician Pierre Louis Maupertuis (1698–1759) to measure a degree of latitude. The aim of the expedition was to measure the length of a degree along a meridian, close to the pole, and compare the result with a similar expedition to Peru, today in Ecuador, near the equator.

Newton’s theory about the flattening of the earth at the poles was finally confirmed in 1744 after all measurements were taken.

Celsius went back to Uppsala after the expedition and focus his work on the changes of the earth’s magnetic field at the time of a northern light and assess the brightness of stars with measuring tools.
At Uppsala Observatory, Celsius favored the division of the temperature scale of a mercury thermometer at air pressure of 760mm of mercury into 100°C, where 100 was taken as the freezing point and 0 as the boiling point of water.

Extraordinary results of his work were even more precise compared to that of Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit and Rene-Antoine Ferchault de Reaumur.

The so-called “Degree Celsius”, the unit of temperature interval, has been named after this brilliant scientist.

Celsius became the secretary of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala in 1725 where he remained until his death.

He died of tuberculosis in 1744.

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