The thermometer, one of the best innovations of the world, is a device that measures the degree of hotness and coldness of any body. The two most important elements of the thermometer are the temperature sensor and also a means through which the physical change can be converted to a numerical value.
The credit for the invention of the thermometer goes to a number of scientists. Before the invention of the thermometer, there was thermoscope, a thermo-meter without scales.
Galileo Galilei, an Italian scientist, invented the first basic water thermoscope in the year 1593. After him, Santorio was the first one to put up the numerical scales in the year 1612. The two most popularly used scales are the Fahrenheit scale, invented by Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit in 1714, and the Celsius scale, invented by the Swedish Astronomer Anders Celsius. There is yet another scale, Kelvin scale (an absolute, thermodynamic temperature scale) mostly used by scientists.
