1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/Celsius, Anders

CELSIUS, ANDERS (1701–1744), Swedish astronomer, was born at Upsala on the 27th of November 1701. He occupied the chair of astronomy in the university of his native town from 1730 to 1744, but travelled during 1732 and some subsequent years in Germany, Italy and France. At Nuremberg he published in 1733 a collection of 316 observations of the aurora borealis made by himself and others 1716–1732. In Paris he advocated the measurement of an arc of the meridian in Lapland, and took part, in 1736, in the expedition organized for the purpose by the French Academy. Six years later he described the centigrade thermometer in a paper read before the Swedish Academy of Sciences (see Thermometry). His death occurred at Upsala on the 25th of April 1744. He wrote: Nova Methodus distantiam solis a terra determinandi (1730); De observationibus pro figura telluris determinanda (1738); besides many less important works.

See W. Ostwald’s Klassiker der exacten Wissenschaften, No. 57 (Leipzig, 1904), where Celsius’s memoir on the thermometric scale is given in German with critical and biographical notes (p. 132); Marie, Histoire des sciences, viii. 30; Poggendorff’s Biog.-literarisches Handwörterbuch.