CELSIUS: A Life and Death by Degrees

Celsius is a name which is used millions of times every day, yet the achievements of this ground-breaking 18th century Swedish scientist, who gave his name to the temperature scale, are not as well-known as you might expect. In a Foreword by the professor of meteorology at Uppsala, Celsius's home town, Ann Rutgersson writes that this study of Celsius's life and career "gives us a perspective on the great challenges of today, when we more than ever need to understand our surroundings... from the perspective of human-induced impact". Celsius was not only the father of modern climatology and earth sciences but also a practitioner of astronomy and the whole realm of natural philosophy - mathematics, geophysics - and a multilingual pioneer of measurement, data and analysis. His career lasted barely two decades, but the author is convinced that he has much to teach us now. When he was a baby, Anders's parents saved him from the great fire of Uppsala in 1702. At the same time they also managed to snatch his grandfather's astronomy and mathematics books, which became the bedrock of young Celsius's later learning. After the fire a professorship of astronomy was founded at the rebuilt university, where Anders became an assistant working on weather data, later moving to the Swedish Royal Society and finally himself becoming Uppsala's Professor of Astronomy. Travels throughout Europe followed, studying sea levels and the northern lights, including a trip to London in 1735, where he met Halley at the Greenwich Royal Observatory, and the polymath Sir Hans Sloane, one of the most eminent scientists of his day, an antiquarian who in the course of his travels had witnessed systematic cruelty to slaves in Jamaica. The author vividly imagines Celsius's first sight of St Paul's Cathedral, only a few decades old, in a city newly rebuilt after the great fire of 1666. London was followed by a hazardous trip to the Arctic, and on the resumption of his studies in Uppsala Celsius introduced the temperature scale named after him, three years before his untimely death from tuberculosis. 304pp, colour photos, timeline, maps.