A Brill Calendar: November 27

The Birth of Celisius

Few periods in the growth of learning and scholarship in Europe may be associated more readily with confidence and optimism than the first half of the 18th century.

During the decades preceding the French Revolution of 1789, élites in the Western world boasted a way of thinking that contrasted dramatically with earlier mentalities. Marking a genesis always involves gratuitous notions. For the dawn of the phenomenon called ‘Enlightenment’, ‘Aufklährung’, ‘Siècle de Lumières’ or ‘Verlichting’ this observation holds as well.

The history of concepts and ideas tends to view that accomplishment largely in the light of philosophers and intellectuals like Thomas Hobbes, Spinoza, René Descartes or Pierre Bayle, but the spirit of the European Enlightenment also breathed through the field-work of physicists and botanists; who started to explore the ever-widening horizons of the world outside the walls of lecture-halls, libraries and reading-rooms - in order to conduct experiments, to draw exactly from nature, to collect specimens and to determine for cartographical purposes distances and exact positions - both on the globe and in its solar system.

When the ground-breaking revelations of geniuses like Isaac Newton and Christiaan Huygens were being assimilated, a lot of work still had to be done. It is seldom that the contribution of innovative instruments to the Enlightenment takes pride of place; as for instance the capability of an instrument to measure temperatures in the physical world.

When Anders Celsius was born in Uppsala, Sweden, November 27, 1701, no dependable or really useful thermometer existed; when he died there, 42 years later, the Frenchman Réaumur and the German Fahrenheit had also rectified this deficiency. It almost looks like a concerted effort of the ‘Zeitgeist’.