Hey, Temperature-Takers!
No matter the season, people are constantly checking the temperature in order to know how to dress as well as what to expect from the weather. A valuable technology for camping, Lewis N. Clark Digital Flashlight Alarm Clock features the calendar day and date and, of course, the temperature!
Checking the temperature is such an everyday habit for us, it might be hard to imagine a time when we couldn’t. But it was just less than 500 years ago that there were no thermometers and no unit of measurement either such as the Fahrenheit or Celsius scales we use today.
Over 400 years ago in the late 1600s, Galileo and a few others rigged up what they called a thermoscope. Thermoscopes worked using tools in water to measure buoyancy and, thus, were able to detect changes in temperature. The degree scale had yet to be developed, which meant that thermoscopes couldn’t actually pinpoint a specific temperature just the rising or falling of heat.
It was 1654 when the Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinand II, got wise and used alcohol enclosed in a glass tube. The alcohol would expand and contract when heated and cooled—the very phenomenon at work in our modern mercury thermometers. This was essentially the first thermometer, however, there still was no standardized scale for measuring temperature.
It was Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit—a German physicist who developed our standardized Fahrenheit scale and invented the modern mercury thermometer in 1714. Of course, even the mercury thermometer is a bit outdated as we now have digital thermometers like our Lewis N. Clark Digital Flashlight Alarm Clock.
Digital thermometers work a whole different way. Inside them, there is a resistor as well as a tiny computing mechanism. Changes in temperature register a change in the amount of resistance applied by the resistor and the computing piece converts the difference in resistance into temperature and offers a digital readout.
Stay warm through these chilly winter days and check out the Lewis N. Clark Digital Flashlight Clock as well as our entire Lewis N Clark collection right here. As always, thanks for reading, Folks! Till next time.
- John