Trace the development of the liquid-in glass thermometer?

Answer 1

There are records before the 17th century indicating that air enclosed in a container would expand or contract with temperature and push water in a tube to different levels. These were not thermometers as much as curiosities. It needed to be understood that there existed a quantitative measure of this phenomena that was a reproducible response to hot and cold and that temperature could be a number.

It is in the early 1600s that records appear of such quantitative scientific investigations. Galileo was one of these investigators. It occurred to several people at this time to put markings on a tube where water level changed when heated or cooled. It took another 50 years for this to evolve into a sealed tube with a bulb and become reliable as a scientific instrument. As scientific developments go, this was quite rapid, indicating the importance of being able to communicate as result at a certain temperature to someone with a different temperature measuring instrument in a different country.

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