IKA S2020
6
Using instruments to measure temperature – whether of objects or living beings, of the earth or the atmosphere – has only been possible for a relatively short time. Although experiments with appliances and scales date back to the days of classical antiquity, precise measurements only became possible around 1654 in Florence when the first thermometer was built, commissioned by the Medici. This was an astonishing fragile instrument, a glass tube in which an amount of alcohol, sealed off from the air, expanded or shrank, depending on the temperature.1 This instrument allowed measurement to be made and compared, not just in Florence but at the same time in Pisa, Bologna, Paris, Innsbruck and Osnabrück. Ideally always employing the same method, regularly, at the same time using at least two thermometers, one of them facing north,
the other south. In addition, notes were made as well as ‘drawings of hailstones or of flowers that were just starting to blossom’. The concern was to link and record scientific observations with the help of a measurement network, in order to arrive at an objective, ordered understanding of the world. Not everyone wished for this ordered understanding. Above all it was not ‘willed by God’. Temperature, heat and cold appeared to be ‘the concern of God’. To deter the Medici from further such undertakings the Church gave them a bishopric and in return they stopped taking the measurements in 1670, after just 16 years2, until around 1760, a Europe-wide measurement network was established, followed around 1870 by a worldwide network which for the past 150 years has supplied data measured by instruments, with increasingly greater precision and detail.3
