Greek Inventions

Thermometer

We use the thermometer every day in our lives and climatology as we know it would be very different without this simple device. The thermometer is a very old invention that dates back to the Greeks of Alexandria who discovered that air expanded when heated. Philo of Byzantium, who lived 2,000 years ago, made a basic thermometer that used this concept. Roughly 1,600 years later, Galileo would use this same concept and put a scale on it to help distinguish temperature so that people could know how hot or cold it was on any given day of the week.