I don’t think that’s Nicki Minaj’s song…
Mercury thermometers are still the best, most stable instruments available at reasonable prices. High stability, one found in an inherited box will still perform as well as it did half century ago. No drift, no aging, commonly available with resolution of 100 millikelvins or even less.
The fancy electronic alternatives are good for automation, as they can provide the value for the rest of the instrumentation and can be automatically logged, but they SORELY need something to be referenced against. The best of which is, drumrolls please, a mercury thermometer.
Which the European Commission, in its unlimited wisdom, banned from selling in 2014.
Which is luckily not so much of an obstacle, as they can still be bought from e.g. Hong Kong, blessed be globalization. Or from non-compliant vendors, blessed be disobedience.
And they can still be read electronically, via e.g. a webcam and image analysis. Which is handy for automated calibration.
Mercury is conductive, so it should be trivial to build an electronic mercury thermometer without resorting to optics.
Inductive sensing, that could work.
Integration of a wire into the capillary is also possible but mechanically difficult, and introduction of additional material into the volume may compromise the accuracy.
Generally, I’d be in favor of not having anything going through the glass into the mercury. More chances for the instrument to go wrong in some way. It is doable, was done, but there are better ways.
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