Hi I’m Craig, I'm of average height. I guess you could say I'm fair... in height, and this
is Mental Floss on YouTube. Today, I’m going to answer Martin Prince’s big question,
“Why do Americans use Fahrenheit?”
I know some of you hate it when I don’t use Celsius, so today I’m going to spend
an entire video talking about Fahrenheit. Let’s get started!
First: I’m going to give a little history of Fahrenheit and Celsius. So, the Fahrenheit
scale was developed by a German man named Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit in 1724. It’s
believed that he originally had 0° being the temperature of ice cold salt water, 32°
as ice water, and 96° as body temperature. Over time, the scale shifted a little, but
it was used in English-speaking countries for centuries.
The Celsius scale was developed in 1744. It’s named for a Swedish astronomer, Anders Celsius,
who created a scale in which 0° was the boiling point of water and 100° was the freezing
point. What that's the reverse! Well The modern Celsius scale was the opposite of that.
In most English-speaking countries, Fahrenheit was used up until about the 1960s. Then, all
those places (besides the U.S.) began to switch over to Celsius and the metric system. Those
crazy free-wheelin metric 60's. Most had been trying to switch to metric system since the
1800s because it obviously made more sense. But there was some hesitation, especially
when reporting weather. A 2006 article by the London newspaper The Times claimed, "-6
°C sounds colder than 21 °F and 94 °F sounds more impressive than 34 °C." You want to
be impressed by your temperatures, you know?
So why doesn’t the U.S. switch over? Well, we’ve tried. Like, in 1875, the U.S. joined
the Metre Convention, which was a treaty signed by 17 nations. Those nations developed a standardized
metric system, which started with measurements of mass and length, but eventually included
temperature.
Over the course of the next few decades, it seemed like the U.S. would definitely switch
over to metric, and we did and now it's metric everywhere happy ending, not true. The UK
and Canada did switch in the sixties so why didn't we? In 1975, Congress passed the Metric
Conversion Act. This act claimed that Metric was, quote, "the preferred system of weights
and measures for United States trade and commerce.” It also stated that the government would,
quote, “coordinate and plan the increasing use of the metric system in the United States.”
The government agency USMB, or United States Metric Board, was created soon after the Act
was passed. But, the public still wasn’t convinced. And the Board didn’t have enough
power to force the country to switch over. Eventually, Ronald Reagan’s administration
shut down the USMB in 1982.
There’s still some traction and many people in the U.S. who’d like to switch to metric.
But, it's has been a slow process and many remain resistant. And weirdly, you still see
Fahrenheit crop up in scientific journals and engineering. This is for one main reason:
the degrees are smaller, so you can get twice the level of precision before needing decimals.
Then there's a secondary reason, 'murica rah.
Thanks for watching Mental Floss on YouTube, which is made with the help of all these nice
Celsiuses. If you have a Big Question of your own that you’d like answered, leave it below
in comments. See you next week! That one might be a Fahrenheit, actually.