Ten fun facts about Anders Celsius

Fact 1
He was professor of astronomy at Uppsala University from 1730 to 1744.

Fact 2
He founded the Uppsala Astronomical Observatory in 1741.

Fact 3
In 1742 he proposed the Celsius temperature scale which bears his surname, though this was revised in 1745 by Carl Linnaeus, inverting the original scale, one year after Celsius' death from tuberculosis.

Fact 4
He was the first to suggest a connection between the aurora borealis and changes in the magnetic field of the Earth.

Fact 5
He proposed the Celsius temperature scale in a paper to the Royal Society of Sciences in Uppsala, the oldest Swedish scientific society, founded in 1710.

Fact 6
Celsius originally called his scale centigrade derived from the Latin for "hundred steps".

Fact 7
Celsius conducted many geographical measurements for the Swedish General map, and was one of earliest to note that much of Scandinavia is slowly rising above sea level, a continuous process which has been occurring since the melting of the ice from the latest ice age.

Fact 8
Celsius traveled frequently in the early 1730s, including to Germany, Italy and France, when he visited most of the major European observatories.

Fact 9
Celsius was the first to perform and publish careful experiments aiming at the definition of an international temperature scale on scientific grounds.

Fact 10
He determined the dependence of the boiling of water with atmospheric pressure which was accurate even by modern day standards.