A thermometer is a device that measures temperature or a temperature gradient (the degree of hotness or coldness of an object). A thermometer has two important elements: (1) a temperature sensor (e.g. the bulb of a mercury-in-glass thermometer or the pyrometric sensor in an infrared thermometer) in which some change occurs with a change in temperature; and (2) some means of converting this change into a numerical value (e.g. the visible scale that is marked on a mercury-in-glass thermometer or the digital readout on an infrared model). Thermometers are widely used in technology and industry to monitor processes, in meteorology, in medicine, and in scientific research.
Some of the principles of the thermometer were known to Greek philosophers of two thousand years ago. As Henry Carrington Bolton (1900) noted, the thermometer's "development from a crude toy to an instrument of precision occupied more than a century, and its early history is encumbered with erroneous statements that have been reiterated with such dogmatism that they have received the false stamp of authority." The Italian physician Santorio Santorio (Sanctorius, 1561-1636) is commonly credited with the invention of the first thermometer, but its standardisation was completed through the 17th and 18th centuries. In the first decades of the 18th century in the Dutch Republic, Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit made two revolutionary breakthroughs in the history of thermometry. He invented the mercury-in-glass thermometer (first widely used, accurate, practical thermometer) and Fahrenheit scale (first standardized temperature scale to be widely used).