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Anders Celsius

 

(born Nov. 27, 1701, Uppsala, Swed. — died April 25, 1744, Uppsala) Swedish astronomer. He taught at the University of Uppsala from 1730 to his death. In 1733 he published a collection of 316 observations of the aurora borealis. In 1744 he built the Uppsala Observatory. He is best known for his invention of the Celsius (often called centigrade) thermometer scale (1742), which set the freezing point of water at 0° and the boiling point of water at 100°.

For more information on Anders Celsius, visit Britannica.com.

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Swedish astronomer (1701–1744)

Celsius, the son of a mathematician, became professor of astronomy at the university in his native city of Uppsala, where he opened an observatory in 1740. In 1742 he devised a temperature scale in which the temperature of melting ice was taken as 100° and the temperature of boiling water was taken to be 0°. The modern Celsius (or centigrade) scale has the opposite fixed points (ice point 0°; steam point 100°C).

Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:

Anders Celsius

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Anders Celcius (1701-1744) was an astronomer who invented the celcius temperature scale the most widely used in the world today.

Celsius is a familiar name to much of the world since it represents the most widely accepted scale of temperature. It is ironic that its inventor, Anders Celsius, the inventor of the Celsius scale, was primarily an astronomer and did not conceive of his temperature scale until shortly before his death.

The son of an astronomy professor and grandson of a mathematician, Celsius chose a life within academia. He studied at the University of Uppsala where his father taught, and in 1730 he, too, was given a professorship there. His earliest research concerned the aurora borealis (northern lights), and he was the first to suggest a connection between these lights and changes in the earth's magnetic field.

Celsius traveled for several years, including an expedition into Lapland with French astronomer Pierre-Louis Maupertuis (1698-1759) to measure a degree of longitude. Upon his return he was appointed steward to Uppsala's new observatory. He began a series of observations using colored glass plates to record the magnitude of certain stars. This constituted the first attempt to measure the intensity of starlight with a tool other than the human eye.

The work for which Celsius is best known is his creation of a hundred-point scale for temperature, although he was not the first to have done so since several hundred-point scales existed at that time. Celsius' unique and lasting contribution was the modification of assigning the freezing and boiling points of water as the constant temperatures at either end of the scale. When the Celsius scale debuted in 1747 it was the reverse of today's scale, with zero degrees being the boiling point of water and one hundred degrees being the freezing point. A year later the two constants were exchanged, creating the temperature scale we use today. Celsius originally called his scale centigrade (from the Latin for "hundred steps"), and for years it was simply referred to as the Swedish thermometer. In 1948 most of the world adopted the hundred-point scale, calling it the Celsius scale.

Columbia Encyclopedia:

Anders Celsius

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Celsius, Anders (än'dərs sĕl'sēŭs), 1701-44, Swedish astronomer. While professor of astronomy at the Univ. of Uppsala (1730-44), he traveled through Germany, France, and Italy, visiting great observatories. At Nuremberg in 1733 he published a collection of 316 observations of the aurora borealis made by himself and others. While in Paris he was instrumental in bringing about an expedition (of which he became a member) organized by the French Academy for the measurement of an arc of the meridian in Lapland (1736). He supervised the building of an observatory at Uppsala in 1740 and became its director; while there he pioneered in the measuring of the magnitude of stars, using photometric methods. In 1742 he invented the centigrade (or Celsius) thermometer. His works include De observationibus pro figura telluris determinanda (1738).
Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Anders Celsius

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Anders Celsius

Anders Celsius
Born 27 November 1701(1701-11-27)
Uppsala, Sweden
Died 25 April 1744(1744-04-25) (aged 42)
Uppsala, Sweden
Residence Sweden
Nationality Swedish
Fields Astronomy, Physics, Mathematics, Geology
Alma mater Uppsala University
Known for Celsius
Signature

Anders Celsius (27 November 1701 – 25 April 1744) was a Swedish astronomer. He was professor of astronomy at Uppsala University from 1730 to 1744, but traveled from 1732 to 1735 visiting notable observatories in Germany, Italy and France. He founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1741, and in 1742 he proposed the Celsius temperature scale which takes his name. The scale was later reversed in 1745 by Carl Linnaeus, one year after Celsius' death from tuberculosis.

Contents

Biography

Young life

Anders Celsius was born in Uppsala, Sweden on 27 November 1701. His family originated from Ovanåker in the province of Hälsingland. The family name is a Latin version of the name of the vicarage (Högen). Anders was raised a Lutheran.

As the son of an astronomy professor, Nils Celsius, and the grandson of the mathematician Magnus Celsius and the astronomer Anders Spole, Celsius chose a career in science. He was a talented mathematician from an early age. Anders Celsius studied at Uppsala University, where his father was a teacher, and in 1730 he too, became a professor of astronomy there.

Career

In 1730, he published the Nova Methodus distantiam solis a terra determinandi (New Method for Determining the Distance from the Sun to the Earth). His research also involved the study of auroral phenomena, which he conducted with his assistant Olof Hiorter, and he was the first to suggest a connection between the aurora borealis and changes in the magnetic field of the Earth.[1] He observed the variations of a compass needle and found that larger deflections correlated with stronger auroral activity. 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.[2]

Celsius traveled frequently in the early 1730s, including to Germany, Italy, and France, when he visited most of the major European observatories. In Paris he advocated the measurement of an arc of the meridian in Lapland. In 1736, he participated in the expedition organized for that purpose by the French Academy of Sciences, 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. The expeditions confirmed Isaac Newton's belief that the shape of the earth is an ellipsoid flattened at the poles.[3]

Celsius

In 1738, he published the De observationibus pro figura telluris determinanda (Observations on Determining the Shape of the Earth). Celsius' participation in the Lapland expedition won him much respect in Sweden with the government and his peers, and played a key role in generating interest from the Swedish authorities in donating the resources required to construct a new modern observatory in Uppsala. He was successful in the request, and Celsius founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1741. The observatory was equipped with instruments purchased during his long voyage abroad, comprising the most modern instrumental technology of the period"

In astronomy, Celsius began a series of observations using colored glass plates to record the magnitude (a measure of brightness) of certain stars. This was the first attempt to measure the intensity of starlight with a tool other than the human eye. He made observations of eclipses and various astronomical objects and published catalogues of carefully determined magnitudes for some 300 stars using his own photometric system (mean error=0.4 mag).[3]

Celsius was the first to perform and publish careful experiments aiming at the definition of an international temperature scale on scientific grounds. In his Swedish paper "Observations of two persistent degrees on a thermometer" he reports on experiments to check that the freezing point is independent of latitude (and of atmospheric pressure). He determined the dependence of the boiling of water with atmospheric pressure which was accurate even by modern day standards. He further gave a rule for the determination of the boiling point if the barometric pressure deviates from a certain standard pressure.[4] He proposed the Celsius temperature scale in a paper to the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, the oldest Swedish scientific society, founded in 1710. His thermometer was calibrated with a value of 0° for the boiling point of water and 100° for the freezing point. In 1745, a year after his death, the scale was reversed by Carl Linnaeus to facilitate more practical measurement.[5] Celsius originally called his scale centigrade derived from the Latin for "hundred steps". For years it was simply referred to as the Swedish thermometer.

File:UppsalaCelsiusObserva.moltory Busser.jpg
The observatory of Anders Celsius, from a contemporary engraving.

Celsius conducted many geographical measurements for the Swedish General map, and was one of earliest to note that much of Scandinavia is slowly rising above sea level, a continuous process which has been occurring since the melting of the ice from the latest ice age. However he wrongly posed the notion that the water was evaporating.[3]

In 1725 he became secretary of the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, and served at this post until his death from tuberculosis in 1744. He supported the formation of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm in 1739 by Linnaeus and five others, and was elected a member at the first meeting of this academy. It was in fact Celsius who proposed the new academy's name.[6]

References

Celsius is buried at Uppsala Church in Gamla Uppsala next to his grandfather

 
 
Related topics:
celsius
Celsius Scale (science)
centigrade

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Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. Britannica Concise Encyclopedia. © 1994-2012 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Oxford Dictionary of Scientists. A Dictionary of Scientists. Copyright © Market House Books Ltd 1993, 1999, 2003. All rights reserved.  Read more
$copyright.smallImage.alttext Gale Encyclopedia of Biography. Gale Encyclopedia of Biography. © 2006 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2012, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/ Read more
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