Anders Celsius

Anders Celsius was a man of the heavens who left his mark on everyday life. As a professor of astronomy at Uppsala University, his mind was fixed on the stars; he led an expedition to measure the shape of the Earth, studied the aurora borealis, and founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory. Yet, it was a problem of earthly measurement that secured his immortality. In 1742, seeking a reproducible standard, he proposed a temperature scale with 100 degrees between two fixed points. In a twist of historical irony, his original system was the inverse of what we use today: he set 0 as the boiling point of water and 100 as its freezing point. Shortly after his early death at 42, fellow scientists, including Carl Linnaeus, flipped the scale to its now-universal form. The centigrade scale, later renamed in his honor, became the Celsius scale, a fundamental tool of science and daily weather reports, proving that the most profound scientific legacies are often those we use without a second thought.