How many degrees are there between boiling and freezing point of water in degrees fahrenheit?

On the Fahrenheit temperature scale, pure water reaches its boiling point at 212 degrees and its freezing point at 32 degrees. To find the range between these two critical states of matter, you simply perform a straightforward subtraction of the freezing temperature from the boiling temperature. This calculation, 212 minus 32, results in a span of exactly 180 degrees.

The seemingly unusual numbers of 32 and 212 stem from how the scale was developed in the early 18th century by physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit. He did not initially base his scale on the properties of pure water. Instead, he set 0 degrees as the freezing point of a specific brine solution and used other fixed points, like an approximation of human body temperature. When his scale was later standardized, the freezing and boiling points of pure water naturally fell at 32 and 212 degrees, respectively.

This 180-degree interval is a key feature that distinguishes the Fahrenheit scale from the Celsius scale. The Celsius scale was purposefully designed with 100 degrees between water's freezing point (0 degrees) and boiling point (100 degrees). Because Fahrenheit divides the same temperature range into more units, a single degree Fahrenheit represents a smaller, more granular change in temperature than a single degree Celsius.