Scott Hensinger, age 10, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, for his question:

Who made the very first thermometer?

It is no problem to tell that boiling water is hotter than ice water. But the measuring of temperature in exact degrees gets harder. It is not surprising that our ancestors took a long time to make the very first thermometer and still longer to make an accurate one. So far as we know, the first gadget to measure warmer and cooler temperatures was made in the year 1593. It was made by the great Italian astronomer Galileo and he named it the thermoscope. The idea was good and thermometers were needed. But this first one was not very accurate or very reliable.

However, Galileo's thermometer proved that a temperature measuring instrument could and should be made. Several inventors tried to make better ones. In 1641, a fairly accurate thermometer was made. But the ancestor of our modern thermometers was not made until 1714. Its inventor was Gabriel Fahrenheit, who also invented the Fahrenheit scale of degrees to go with his thermometer.