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and starting to melt. We then note the position of the mercury column on
the glass tube. We can call this level whatever we like, but
we choose to call
it 0 ºC. We then place the tube in boiling water and watch the mercury
column expand to another length. We then call this level 100 ºC for
convenience. We can then divide the length between the two positions into
100 equal segments and call each one 1 ºC. Note that there is nothing
special about this way of putting marks on a thermometer.
It is simply for
human convenience. We could have equally chosen a material other than
water to calibrate our thermometer. We could have chosen wax. That it, we
could have chosen 0 ºC to be the temperature when wax just starts to melt,
and 100 ºC when it boils. There is also no need to call one 0 and one 100
such as the Fahrenheit scale which we will not be using here.
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