Happy Birthday, Celsius!
Environment Canada’s use of Celsius turns 50 years old in 2025.
It was the catalyst of a lengthy national metric conversion that abruptly ended a decade after it began.
The result is seen and felt every day. Canadians wear clothes measured in inches and buy gas by the litre. They drink from millilitre beer cans and step on bathroom scales in pounds. They eat cereal by the gram and sub sandwiches by the foot.
Give someone an inch, and they’ll take a kilometre.
A bone-chilling April Fools’ Day in 1975 marked the first time Canadians used Celsius to measure weather temperature.
“We were the guinea pig,” said David Phillips with Environment and Climate Change Canada. He joined the weather service seven years before the Celsius switch.
They tried to get the word out, he said.
“I remember that first little flyer that (said), ‘It’s no April Fools’ joke.”
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Global News
December 31, 2024