Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

"Please take your temperature." During the epidemic, for the sake of everyone's health and safety, we need to take body temperature in many scenarios.

So before the modern thermometer was invented, how did people judge whether their body temperature was normal or not, and how did they measure indoor and outdoor temperatures?

Today, I'm going to talk to you about the topic of "measuring temperature".

Feeling cold and warm, feeling cold and summer, the Chinese have long discovered that the body temperature of healthy people is constant. So take the normal body temperature as the standard temperature, that is, the modern 37 degrees Celsius, to speculate whether the body surface temperature is high or low, that is, the so-called "fever" and "chill" in traditional Chinese medicine.

The situation of taking body temperature and diagnosing diseases has been recorded in the Huangdi Nei Jing, the earliest classic of traditional Chinese medicine in China: "the heat of the foot is the temperature of the disease, and the foot is not hot and the pulse is slippery." The so-called "ruler heat" and "ruler not hot" refers to fever or non-fever.

"ruler" is one of the pulse acupoints at the wrist end, which is connected with "cun" and "Guan". Collectively known as "cun Guan Zhi", it is a necessary part for traditional Chinese medicine to touch when seeing a doctor. The "cutting" method of the four methods of looking, smelling, asking and cutting in traditional Chinese medicine is to take the pulse phase and body temperature, cut in the ulnar part. The four methods of looking, smelling, asking and cutting were created by Bian Que, a famous ancient doctor. According to the Biography of Bian Que, Bian Que was a famous doctor in the warring States period. Thus it can be seen that traditional Chinese medicine in the pre-Qin period has a set of systematic methods on how to measure body temperature and judge diseases accordingly.

It is worth noting that the "armpit temperature" commonly used in modern medicine to measure body temperature has been widely used in the Northern and Southern dynasties. Ancient people fully understood this special "thermometer" and applied it in the processing of cheese, Douchi, sericulture and tea.

There is a saying in Volume 8 of Qi Min Yao Shu, "making Black Bean Bean", to make Douchi, it is necessary to arrange a warm room that can not be exposed to the sun, and the temperature is the best to keep the temperature under the armpit of the human body, that is, "the rate often wants to make it as warm as a person's armpit" and "wait in the middle of the pile with hand prickles. Look like armpits warm."

In the process of making tempeh, we have to go into the house and observe it twice a day and insert it into the pile of beans by hand to see if it needs to be turned over. "if a person's armpit is warm, turn it over." It can be seen that although the temperature of the four seasons is different, the production temperature will change accordingly, but the temperature required for food production by the constant temperature of the human body is not affected by the ambient temperature.

In addition, it is also mentioned that herdsmen make cheese, so that the temperature of the cheese is "warm in the human body, suitable for the time", and the reason is naturally the same. From this, we can draw the conclusion that the Chinese had measured the armpit temperature in the Northern and Southern dynasties at the latest, and knew that the armpit temperature was more stable and accurate.

When talking about the water temperature of washing silkworm eggs, Chen Kui, an agronomist in the Song Dynasty, said: "to adjust the temperature of water bath, the water can not be cold or hot, but it can be like the human body." When discussing the best room temperature for sericulture, Wang Zhen, an agronomist in the Yuan Dynasty, pointed out that sericulturists "need to wear single clothes to test: if you feel cold, the silkworms will be cold, which will add cooked fire; if you feel hot, the silkworms will also be hot, and about the amount will be removed."

Cai Xiang, an expert on baking tea in the Song Dynasty, once said that tea is "a collection house, sealed with cymbal leaves, and baked for two or three days. Fire is often used at a time like a person's body temperature, while the temperature is moist, and if there is too much fire, the tea coke cannot be eaten."

Precision temperature measurement time [℃], [℉], [°R φ] this is our common temperature scale, and it is also our commonly used temperature standard at present. But about temperature, what happens when everything is inconclusive?

In 1650, Ferdinando II, Archduke of Tuscany, made key design changes to the old thermometer and achieved another breakthrough. He is believed to be the first person to create a sealed design thermometer that is not affected by air pressure.

In 1654, he is said to have been inspired by Galileo to invent a sealed glass thermometer, which sealed the glass tip of a tube containing colored alcohol. The thermometer consists of a vertical glass tube filled with distilled liquor, in which glass bubbles at different pressure levels rise and fall as the temperature changes. He was so keen on measuring heat that in 1657 he founded a private college where researchers explored the various forms and shapes of their thermometers, including ornate designs with spiral cylinders.

There has been no recognized standard for temperature calibration throughout Europe. The way people try to find reference points is very casual; they use a wide range of criteria, such as the melting point of melted butter, the internal temperature of animals, the cellar temperature of the Paris Observatory, the hottest or coldest day of the year in cities, and the temperature of coal burned in kitchen fires. No two thermometers always record the same temperature, so people can't reach a consensus.

The freezing point became the first recognized temperature standard. Danish astronomer Ole Christensen Romer has announced an innovation that will change temperature measurements forever.

In 1701, he had an idea to calibrate a scale relative to something more readily available: the freezing point and boiling point of water. Similar to the way we measure minutes within an hour, the range between these points can be divided into 60 degrees. Although he could have done it, and it would have been great, he didn't do it completely.

Awkwardly, because he initially used frozen salt water as the low-end calibration point, the freezing point of the water he measured appeared at 7.5 degrees instead of 0. Today, it is called Roche temperature scale, it is of historical significance, but it has not been officially used.

1689

As interest in thermometers continues to grow across Europe, a young businessman finds that these instruments are becoming an increasingly popular trade commodity. He also found them very charming. His name is Daniel Gabriel Wallenheit and he was born in Poland.

1708

His fate was changed by poisonous mushrooms.

When Daniel was only 12 years old, his father and mother died of eating poisonous mushrooms. As a result, he and his brothers and sisters were taken in by a new guardian and began an apprenticeship in business. Young Daniel doesn't care about this profession. He is more interested in science and glass blowing, with a mission to research, create and design thermometers and barometers. But in his relentless pursuit of these activities, he accumulated debts that he could not repay. Warren Haight escaped his fate by fleeing his country of birth. He needs to wait until the age of 24 to get his inheritance and be able to repay his debts. He wandered in Germany, Denmark and Sweden for 12 years, while continuing to pursue the science he loved.

In this temperature scale, the original zero degree is set at the freezing point of salt water. The boiling point of water is defined as 60 degrees.

Later, Romer found that the distance between the freezing point of pure water and salt water was about 1/8 of the whole scale, so he set the lower fixed point at the freezing point of pure water as 7.5 degrees. This does not significantly change the temperature scale, but changing the reference into pure water makes the correction easier.

1709

Warren Haight invented the alcohol thermometer.

1714

Warren Haight invented the glass mercury thermometer (the first widely used, practical and accurate thermometer).

1724

Warren Haight launched a standard temperature scale named after him, the first widely used standardized temperature scale, which laid the foundation for the era of accurate temperature measurement. In other words, Fahrenheit's invention initiated the first revolution in the history of temperature measurement (the branch of physics related to temperature measurement methods). From the early 1710s to the beginning of the electronic age, the glass mercury thermometer was one of the most reliable and accurate thermometers ever made.

After the global adoption of the metric scale, the Fahrenheit system was replaced by the scale invented by the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius in 1742. Anders Merseus was the first person in the field of science to use and publish careful experiments to define the international temperature scale.

In 1742 he proposed the Celsius temperature scale in his paper "observation of two persistent degrees on a thermometer" published in Swedish, and he reported experiments to check whether the freezing point of water had nothing to do with latitude (or atmospheric pressure). He determined the relationship between the boiling point of water and atmospheric pressure (which is very consistent with modern data).

He also gives a law for measuring boiling point if the air pressure is different from a certain standard pressure. Originally, his thermometer was based on the boiling point of water at 0 degrees and the freezing point at 100 degrees.

Correction: the "dangerous disease" in the table should be "Fahrenheit". Later, this temperature scale was reversed by Karl Linnay in 1745, with the boiling point of water at 100 degrees and the freezing point at zero degrees, which has been used ever since.

Wen Yuan: a bird flying thousands of years early: science and technology of meteorological observation and measurement in ancient China.

Author: Huang Wei

Painter: Huang tasseled child

The picture in this article is derived from books.

The copyright belongs to the original author

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Origin Reading (ID:tupydread), author: Huang Wei, Editor: Zhang Runxin

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