User:Syncategoremata/Ibn Sīnā and the invention of the thermometer

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Various pages in Wikipedia contain the claim that ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) invented the thermometer. This claim is almost certainly false as I will attempt to document here. If anyone can find a good source that supports this claim, please do let me know.

The Wikipedia pages give two references for this claim:

  • Briffault, Robert (1919). The Making of Humanity. London: George Allen & Unwin.

The first of these, Briffault 1919, simply says that "Ibn Sina is said to have employed an air thermometer" (p.191). The book is a non-scholarly work and as such gives no sources for any of its claims.

The second of these, Al-Hayani 2005, is of little value for the following reasons:

  • the reference (p.566) is unsourced;
  • it says that "Avicenna used thermometers to measure air temperature", which shows that her account probably comes directly or indirectly from Briffault;
  • as the article says, she is "a lecturer and court expert on Islamic Jurisprudence" (p.565), and so isn't claiming any special knowledge of the history of science.

That then just leaves Briffault who, as I said above, gives no source for his claim, though his account appears to derive from the following work:

There Humboldt says that "[t]he invention of an air thermometer is also ascribed to Avicenna from a notice by Sanctorius, but this notice is very obscure" (p.219). So obscure in fact that it doesn't actually say that. Sanctorius does give prior credit to Hero of Alexandria but that is all. The reason that Humboldt may have thought Sanctorius was giving some credit to ibn Sīnā is that the text where he reports his work on the thermometer is his Sanctorii Sanctorii Commentaria in primam fen primi libri Canonis Avicennae, a commentary on ibn Sīnā's The Canon of Medicine.

The reason for believing that Briffault's account derives from Humboldt is that the full quote from Briffault is "Ibn Sina is said to have employed an air thermometer, and Ibn Yunis certainly did use the pendulum for the measurement of time" (p.191) and that these two claims appear in the same order on the same page in the English translation of Humboldt's work. The claim about Ibn Yunus is given by Humboldt as "it will be suffcient to mention [...] the knowledge and first application of the pendulum as a means of measuring time, due to the great astronomer Ebn-Junis" (p.219). As a side note, this claim about the pendulum is also wrong, as has been shown by King, David A. (1979). "Ibn Yunus and the Pendulum: A History of Errors". Archives Internationales d'Histoire des Sciences. 29 (104): 35–52..

I've checked all the references I've been able to find that repeat Humboldt and Briffault's claim about the origin of the thermometer, and all of them seem to derive directly or indirectly from Briffault. In particular none of them give any source other than Briffault for any such claim. A list of printed sources repeating this claim can be found at the end of this page.

To see whether there are any other sources for this claim, I have checked all the relevant works that I have access to. This includes all the books from the Warburg Institute library and from the University of London Senate House library that are about ibn Sīnā or about the history of the thermometer and the measurement of temperature, along with all of the standard reference works on the history and technology of the period. None of these works mention any connection between ibn Sina and the origin of the thermometer. The following is just a partial list of the books and articles I've checked.

  • Afnan, Soheil Muhsin (1958). Avicenna, his life and works. London: G. Allen & Unwin. ISBN 9789839541670.
  • Bearman, P. J (1960). The Encyclopaedia of Islam (New ed.). Leiden: Brill. ISBN 9789004156104.
  • Dictionary of Scientific Biography. American Council of Learned Societies. Charles Coulston Gillispie (ed.). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1970.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  • Livesey, Steven John (2005). Medieval Science, Technology, and Medicine: An Encyclopedia. Thomas F. Glick, Faith Wallis (eds.). Routledge. ISBN 9780415969307.
  • Goodman, Lenn Evan (1992). Avicenna: Arabic Thought and Culture. Routledge. ISBN 9780415019293.
  • Koertge, Noretta (2007). New Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Scribner's. ISBN 9780684313207.
  • McGee, Thomas Donald (1988). Principles and Methods of Temperature Measurement. Wiley-IEEE. ISBN 9780471627678.
  • Meri, Josef W. (2006). Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopaedia. Routledge Encyclopedias of the Middle Ages. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 9780415966917.
  • Middleton, William Edgar Knowles (1966). A History of the Thermometer and Its Use in Meteorology. Johns Hopkins Press.
  • Negretti & Zambra, London (1958). A Story of Temperature Measurement. London: Negretti & Zambra.
  • Toward Modern Science: Studies in Ancient and Medieval Science. Robert Palter (ed.). New York: Noonday Press. 1961.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  • Toward Modern Science: Studies in Renaissance Science. Robert Monroe Palter (ed.). New: Noonday Press. 1961.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  • Rāshid, Rushdī (1996). Encyclopedia of the History of Arabic Science. Routledge. ISBN 9780415124102. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
  • Ronan, Colin A. (1983). The Cambridge Illustrated History of the World's Science. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 9780600384236.
  • Sarton, George (1927). Introduction to the History of Science. Baltimore: Williams and Wilkins.
  • Selin, Helaine (1997). Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. ISBN 9780792340669.
  • Dictionary of the Middle Ages. New York: Scribner. 1982. ISBN 0684167603.
  • Thorndike, Lynn (1923). A History of Magic and Experimental Science. During the first thirteen centuries of our era. Macmillan.

I've found the following printed sources that contain the claim that ibn Sīnā invented the thermometer. (There are many web sources for this claim too, but all are either unsourced or depend on Briffault or Wikipedia; I haven't bothered to list any of those here.)

This book says that "[a]ccording to the celebrated orientalist R. Briffault, an air thermometer is said to have been employed by Ibn Sina" (p.161; found via Google Books snippet view). So this depends on Briffault and is not an independent source.
Discussed above.
This is another non-scholarly reference with no source provided. It presumably comes from Wikipedia or somewhere similar.
Discussed above.
Discussed above.
  • Qurashi, M. M. (1996). History and Philosophy of Muslim Contributions to Science and Technology. Islamabad: Pakistan Academy of Sciences. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
On p.36 this says that "Ibn Sina used the air thermometer to find out air temperature." I found this via Google Books snippet view and can't get to the footnote (and no library in the UK holds a copy of the book) but Briffault is referenced at least twice in the book, so I assume the reference is taken from him.
A footnote on p.293 mentions "He propounded an interconnection between time and motion, and also made investigations on specific gravity and used an air thermometer." but the entire footnote is a copy and paste from http://www.trincoll.edu/depts/phil/philo/phils/muslim/sina.html, right down to the HTML markup at the end. And that page gives no source for its claim.
  • Saud, Muhammad (1983). "Substitution of Free Investigation for Authoritarianism by Muslims". In Hakim Mohammed Said (ed.) (ed.). History and Philosophy of Science: Proceedings of the International Congress of the History and Philosophy of Science, Islamabad, 8-13 December, 1979. Karachi: Hamdard Foundation Press. pp. 62-67 (in pt.2). {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)
The claim is made on p.65 with a reference to an Urdu translation of Briffault, given as "R. Briffault, Making of Humanity (M. Abdul Majeed Salik's Urdu translation) Majlis-e-Traqqi-e-Adab, Lahore, p. 301." So, once more, not an independent source.
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