INCREDIBLE CURIOSITIES

Here we have some of the most amazing  facts about a few of the most important discoveries in Measurment History, let´s check them out!

1. The sound sensation is measured in decibels in honor of Alexander Graham Bell (1847 - 1922), inventor of the telephone.

2. Originally, James Watt defined a unit of power that he called horse power, horsepower, which was to be the power produced by a normal horse in full slaughter, 1 hp = 746 w

3. Legend has it that Fahrenheit chose the size of his unit so that there would be 180 between the freezing point and the fusion point of pure water at sea level. Apparently, I wanted a scale analogous to that of measuring angles. Consequently, the unit was given the name of degree.

4. The word zero probably derives from "zephirum", Latinized form of the Arabic "sifr" which is, in turn, a translation of the Hindu word "sunya" which means empty or nothing.

5. Until the end of the eighteenth century, negative numbers were not universally accepted.

6. The mathematicians of India, in the seventh century, used negative numbers to indicate debts.

7. Gerolamo Cardano, in the sixteenth century, called the negative numbers "false", but in his "Ars Magna" (1545) he studied them exhaustively.

8. John Wallis (1616 - 1703), in his "Arithmetica Infinitorum" (1655), "proves" the impossibility of his existence by saying that "these entities would have to be both greater than infinity and less than zero."

9. Leonard Euler, is the first to give them legal status; in his Anleitung Zur Algebra (1770) he tries to show that (-1) (- 1) = +1

10. From G.H. Hardy (1877 - 1947), one of the most important English mathematicians of the early twentieth century, is said to have given a lecture that a certain mathematical relationship was trivial; then hesitated a moment and asked: "will it be trivial?" He apologized, left the conference room and went to his office. After 20 minutes he returned and declared: "Yes, it is trivial".