ANDERS

CELSIUS (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 Method us distantiam solis a terra determinandi (1730); De observationibus pro figura telluric 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 Handworterbuch .