Why did Gabriel Fahrenheit define the freezing point of water to be 32 degrees instead of 0?
http://chem.oswego.edu/chem209/Misc/fahrenheit.htm Fahrenheit temperature scale, scale based on 32 degree for the freezing point of water and 212 degree for the boiling point of water, the interval between the two being divided into 180 parts. The 18th-century German physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit originally took as the zero of his scale the temperature of an equal ice-salt mixture and selected the values of 30 degree and 90 degree for the freezing point of water and normal body temperature, respectively; these later were revised to 32 degree and 96 degree, but the final scale required an adjustment to 98.6 degree for the latter value.
