How's the fucking weather where you are?

[LarsMac]

Originally Posted by ceptimus

Mr Celsius did invent the whole zero and one hundred for boiling and freezing points of water* thing - although he wanted to have it the opposite way round, with 100 for freezing and 0 for boiling!

Celsius himself said that the scale should be called 'centigrade', which is Latin for one hundred steps, but after he died, other scientists reversed his scale (so that an increasing temperature actually resulted in a rising number!) and started using his name to refer to it. That gradually spread across the English-speaking world, though we were still calling it centigrade until fairly recently** in the UK.

* pure water at standard atmospheric pressure. Actually, the modern accepted values are 99.97 °C for boiling and −0.0001 °C for freezing.

** The BBC officially swapped in February, 1985.

I was thinking, yesterday, that the story was something along those lines, and had planned to go dig it up today, after I had my Coffee.
Thanks!