Jean-Pierre Christin (31 May 1683 – 19 January 1755) was a French physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and musician. His proposal in 1743 to reverse the Celsius thermometer scale (from water boiling at 0 degrees and ice melting at 100 degrees, to where zero represented the freezing point of water and 100 represented the boiling point of water) was widely accepted and is still in use today.[1][2][3]
Christin was born in Lyon. He was a founding member of the Académie des sciences, belles-lettres et arts de Lyon and served as its Permanent Secretary from 1713 until 1755. His thermometer was known in France before the Revolution as the thermometer of Lyon. One of these thermometers was kept at the Science Museum in London.[4]
- ^ Arthur Sigurssen (10 May 2003). "History of the Thermometer". Newsfinder e-magazine. Archived from the original on 6 December 2012. Retrieved 3 July 2012.
- ^ "Celsius Temperature Scale". DiracDelta.co.uk science and engineering encyclopedia. Archived from the original on 10 June 2012. Retrieved 3 July 2012.
- ^ Henry Carrington Bolton (1800): Evolution of the thermometer 1592–1743. The Chemical pub. co., Easton, Pennsylvania. pp. 85–91.
- ^ "Mercury-in-glass thermometer, 1743–1799". Science Museum. Archived from the original on 1 June 2013. Retrieved 3 July 2012.