Many moons ago when I was an undergrad I took a meteorology course. It was my favorite course outside of my major. I’m still fascinated by weather and weather forecasting. In fact, for my next career I might become a meteorologist. All that to say, I was naturally interested when I came across a Met Office (the UK’s national weather service) video about the history of the thermometer and then a YouTube-suggested TED-Ed video The History of the Barometer.

Fahrenheit to Celsius: History of the Thermometer is an eight minute overview of the evolution of thermometers and their units of measurement. The video begins with an introduction to the earliest attempts to measure temperature before progressing into the work of Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit and Anders Celsius. The video explains how Fahrenheit settled on his standards for the freezing and boiling points of water. The video also explains how Anders Celsius did the same and why his original scale is the opposite of what we read on Celsius thermometers today.

The History of the Barometer is a TED-ED lesson that explains how a barometer works and how it was developed. The majority of the video is spent on explaining how the work of Galileo and Evangelista Torricelli contributed to how we measure barometric pressure today.