How thermometers work | Types of thermometers compared (2025)

by Chris Woodford. Last updated: June 13, 2022.

Does it feel boiling hot to you today or is it just me? And how wecan tell? If I say today's hotter than yesterday and you disagree,how can we settle the argument? One easy way is to measure thetemperature with a thermometer on both days and compare the readings.Thermometers are simple scientific instruments based on the idea that metals changetheir behavior in a very precise way as they get hotter (gain more heat energy). Let's take a closer look at how these handy gadgets work.

Photo: Now that's what I call cold! This dial (pointer) thermometer shows the temperature inside my food freezer:around −30°C (inner scale) or −25°F (outer scale). It's exactly the same temperature, but measured in two slightly different ways.

Liquid thermometers

The simplest thermometers really are simple! They're just verythin glass tubes filled with a small amountof silvery liquid (typically mercury—a ratherspecial metal that's a liquid at ordinary, everyday temperatures).When mercury gets hotter, it expands (increases in size) by an amountthat's directly related to the temperature. So if the temperatureincreases by 20 degrees, the mercury expands and moves up the scaleby twice as much as if the temperature increase is only 10 degrees.All we have to do is mark a scale on the glass and we caneasily figure out the temperature.

Photo: A typical thermometer consists of a liquid in a tube that rises and falls against a linear scale(one with equally spaced divisons) marked with the temperature.

How do we figure out the scale? Making a Celsius (centigrade)thermometer is easy, because it's based on the temperatures of iceand boiling water. These are called the two fixed points. Weknow ice has a temperature close to 0°C while water boils at 100°C.If we dip our thermometer in some ice, we can observe where themercury level comes to and mark the lowest point on our scale, whichwill be roughly 0°C. Similarly, if we dip the thermometer inboiling water, we can wait for the mercury to rise up and then make amark equivalent to 100°C. All we have to do then is divide thescale between these two fixed points into 100 equal steps ("centi-grade" means 100 divisions) and, hey presto, we have a working thermometer!

Photo: Alcohol thermometers. As you can just see from the red lines alongside their scales, these historic Dr Pepper thermometers at the Dublin Bottling Works and W.P. Kloster Museum in Dublin, Texas also contain alcohol. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith. Credit: The Lyda Hill Texas Collection of Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith's America Project, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Mercury or alcohol?

Not all liquid thermometers use mercury. If the line you see in your thermometeris red instead of silver, like the one in the picture here, your thermometer isfilled with an alcohol-based liquid (such as ethanol). What's the difference? Mercury is toxic, although perfectly safe if it's sealed inside a thermometer. However, if the glass tube of a mercury thermometerhappens to break, that potentially exposes you to the poisonous liquid inside it. Alcohol thermometers are generally safer for that reason and they canalso be used to measure lower temperatures (because alcohol has a lower freezing pointthan mercury; it's about −114°C or −170°F for pure ethanol compared to about −40°C or −40°F for mercury).

Photo: This thermometer contains a red, alcohol-based liquid and is marked with both a Celsius scale (left, at the bottom of the picture) and a Fahrenheit scale (right, at the top). The current temperature is about 21°C or about 70°F.The Fahenheit scale is named for German physicist Daniel Fahrenheit (1686–1736), whomade the first mercury thermometer in the early 18th century.The Celsius scale is named for the Swedish scientist who devised it, Anders Celsius (1701–1744).

Dial thermometers

Not all thermometers work this way, however. The one shown in ourtop photo has a metal pointer that moves up and down a circularscale. Open up one of these thermometers and you'll see the pointeris mounted on coiled piece of metal called a bimetallic strip that's designed to expand and bend as itgets hotter (see our article on thermostats to find out how it works).The hotter the temperature, the more the bimetallic strip expands, and the more it pushes thepointer up the scale.

Artwork: How a dial thermometer works: This is the mechanism that powers a typical dial thermometer, illustrated in a patent by Charles W. Putnam from 1905. At the top, we have the usual pointer and dial arrangement. The bottom artwork shows what's happening round the back. A bimetallic strip (yellow) is tightly coiled and attached both to the frame of the thermometer and the pointer. It's made up of two different metals bonded together, which expand by different amounts as they heat up. As the temperature changes, the bimetallic strip curves more or less tightly (contracts or expands) and the pointer, attached to it, moves up or down the scale. Artworkfrom US Patent 798,211: Thermometer courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office.

Photo: Here's the coiled bimetallic strip from an actual dial thermometer (the freezer thermometer in our top photo). It's easy to see how it works: if you turn the pointer with your hand toward colder temperatures, the coiled strip tightens up; turn the pointer the other way and the strip loosens.

Electronic thermometers

One problem with mercury and dial thermometers is that they take awhile to react to temperature changes. Electronicthermometers don't have that problem: you simply touch the thermometer probe onto theobject whose temperature you want to measure and the digital displaygives you an (almost) instant temperature reading.

Photo: Electronic medical thermometer from 2010. You put the metal probein your mouth, or somewhere else on your body, and read the temperature off the LCD display.

Electronic thermometers work in an entirely different way tomechanical ones that use lines of mercury or spinning pointers.They're based on the idea that the resistanceof a piece of metal (the ease with which electricity flowsthrough it) changes as the temperature changes. As metals get hotter, atoms vibrate more insidethem, it's harder for electricity to flow, and the resistance increases.Similarly, as metals cool down, the electrons move more freely and the resistancegoes down. (At temperatures close to absolute zero, the lowest theoretically possible temperature of −273.15°C or −459.67°F, resistance disappears entirely in a phenomenon called superconductivity.)

An electronic thermometer works by putting a voltage acrossits metal probe and measuring how much current flows through it. Ifyou put the probe in boiling water, the water's heat makeselectricity flow through the probe less easily so the resistance goesup by a precisely measurable amount. A microchip inside the thermometer measuresthe resistance and converts it into a measurement of temperature.

Photo: Electrical resistance thermometer from 1912: This example of a bridge-type resistance thermometer was built by Leeds and Northrup and used for temperature measurements at the US National Bureau of Standards(now NIST) in the early 20th century. Despite its chunky and clumsy appearance, it's accurate to within 0.0001 degrees.Photo courtesy of National Institute of Standards and Technology Digital Collections, Gaithersburg, MD 20899.

The main advantage of thermometers like this is that they can give aninstant reading in any temperature scale youlike—Celsius, Fahrenheit, or whatever it happens to be. But oneof their disadvantages is that they measure the temperature frommoment to moment, so the numbers they show can fluctuate quitedramatically, sometimes making it difficult to take an accurate reading.

Precise electrical thermometers, known as resistance thermometers, use four resistors arranged in a diamond-shaped circuit called a Wheatstone bridge. If three of the resistors have known values, the resistance of the fourthis easy to calculate. If the fourth resistor is designed in the shape of a temperature probe,a circuit like this can be used as a very precise thermometer: calculating its resistance(from its voltage and current) allows us to calculate its temperature.

Measuring extreme temperatures

If you want to measure something that's too hot or cold for a conventional thermometer tohandle, you'll need a thermocouple: a cunning devicethat measures temperature by measuring electricity. And if you can't get close enough to useeven a thermocouple, you could try using a pyrometer,a kind of thermometer that deduces the temperature of an object from theelectromagnetic radiation it gives off.

What is a temperature scale?

Photo: Temperature scales are linear: a certain rise in temperature always moves you the same distance up the scale. That doesn't mean thermometers have to be made in straight lines, like rulers: it means each division of the temperature scale occupies exactly the same amount of space (or, if you prefer, the mercury, pointer, or other temperature indicator has to move just as far to indicate each new division as the temperature rises or falls). This dial thermometer from a gas boiler shows you the temperature of your central heating in Celsius using a circular (but still linear) scale.

A thermometer doesn't necessarily need a scale or numbers marked on it. Just imagine ifyou were on a desert island and you came across an old thermometer in the sand with thescale and the numbers rubbed away, but otherwise working perfectly okay. You could still usethis it get an idea of temperatures. You could use it very roughly to say things like:"The mercury level is about halfway up, which is higher than it was yesterday, so it must be hotter today."

A better method would be to put your own scale on the thermometer. First, you'd need to findsomething really cold (such as a block of ice), place the thermometeron it, and scratch the glass to mark the mercury level. Then you could do the same thingwith something hot (boiling water) and mark the mercury level again. We call thesetwo reference levels of temperature the fixed points.To make a thermometer scale, all we have to do is divide the distance between the twofixed points into lots of sections of equal length. That's how a centigradethermometer gets its name: it has 100 ("cent") sections ("grades") between thefixed points of ice and steam. What are the different temperature scales and howare they worked out?

How do Celsius and Fahrenheit compare?

You probably know how to convert a Celsius temperature to Fahrenheit: multiply by 9/5 (or 1.8) and then add 32. To convertFahrenheit to Celsius, you do the reverse: subtract 32 and multiply by 5/9 (or divide by 1.8, which is the same thing).When you hear weather forecasts give Celsius temperatures and their Fahrenheit equivalents, you might feel the relationship between them is a little bit odd and confusing, because they seem so different. But if you plot them on a chart (as I have below), you can see that both scales are perfectly linear, and every rise of temperature that adds another 10°C adds 18°F.

Chart: The Celsius temperature scale is shown in blue with the Fahrenheit scale in red alongside. Each point on the chart shows the two equivalent measurements for a certain temperature, so, for example, 20°C is equal to 68°F. Both scales are clearly linear: an increase of 10°C is the same as an increase of 18°F.

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Find out more

On this website

• Heat
• Metals
• Pyrometers
• Thermocouples

On other websites

• Introduction to temperature: All about temperature and how we measure it from the UK's National Physical Laboratory.
• NIST: Units of temperature: Describes different temperature scales and how to convert them.

Books for younger readers

• How do we measure temperature? by Chris Woodford. Gareth Stevens, 2013/Blackbirch, 2005. One of my own books for young readers (ages 7–9). The emphasis here is on temperature as a kind of practical, everyday form of math.
• Fahrenheit, Celsius, and Their Temperature Scalesby Yoming S. Lin. PowerKIDS Press/Rosen, 2012. A historical introduction that runs the stories of Daniel Fahrenheit and Anders Celsius alongside the practical measurement of temperature.
• Measure It! Temperature by Casey Rand. Raintree, 2010. A basic introduction for ages 7–9, including some coverage of related topics such as weather and climate change.
• Temperature: Heating Up and Cooling Down by Darlene R. Stille. Picture Window Books, 2004. An alternative, 24-page introduction for slightly younger readers.
• Thermometers by Adele Richardson. Capstone, 2004. A 32-page introduction covering much the same ground as this article but for younger readers (ages 6–8 or so).

Books for older readers

• Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress by Hasok Chang. Oxford University Press, 2004. The story of how people learned to measure temperature with thermometers. A fairly philosophical and scholarly book, but nevertheless quite readable.
• Temperature Measurement by L. Michalski. Wiley, 2001. A detailed guide to precise temperature measurements for scientists and engineers.
• Principles and Methods of Temperature Measurement by Thomas Donald McGee. Wiley-IEEE, 1988. A detailed (nearly 600-page) textbook covering temperature scales and all the different kinds of temperature sensors, including pyrometers, thermistors, and thermocouples.