Names of scales for measuring temperature?

Answer 1

The most immediately useful and important nowadays are kelvins, Celsius, Fahrenheit, and Rankine. Many others were proposed and/or used during the 17th through 19th centuries: Amonton, Barnsdorf, Beaumuir, Bergen, Brisson, Crucquins, De Luc, Le Lyon, De la Hire, Delancé, Delisle, Ducrest, Edinburgh, Florentine (at least two of those), Fowler, Hales, Hanow, Kirch, La Court, Lange, Leyden, Ludolf, Miles, Murray, Newton, Paris, Poleni, Réaumur, Rømer, Richter, Royal Society of London, Sagredo, Sulzer, and Wedgwood. As you may suspect, the last one was designed for use in pottery kilns.

All of those are linear scales, but there is at least one that's logarithmic, named after its inventor physicist John Dalton (1766-1844). Here, absolute zero registers -infinity D; freezing (273.15 kelvins), 0 D; boiling (373.15 kelvins), 100 D; the melting point of gold (1337 kelvins), around 500 D; and so forth. This comes in handy when you're plotting vast differences in temperature among star types, for example.