Profile
The Founder, G. Raymond Peacock, and The Site’s History
This website, www.temperatures.com (About Temperature Sensors), grew out of a perceived need for more educational information on temperature sensors and their uses in order to supplement the Industrial Temperature Measurement course that Ray Peacock taught for The ISA, (then the “International Systems and Automation Society” previously, the “Instrument Society of America” and now the “International Society of Automation“), in the 1980s and 1990s.
“Frankly,” he says, “The two-day time slot for the program was sufficient to cover only the key properties of three types of temperature sensors and there are many, many more plus lots of technical details that bear on obtaining successful measurements in the ‘real worlds’ of Industry & Science.”
“In fact,” he continues, ” The applications areas are the most fascinating and nearly endless once you begin to look more closely. Yet, they are the places that show the utility and advantages of one sensor over another in many cases.”
“In my opinion, it’s also a lot like the ‘Case Study’ method used at some Law Schools; successful uses are the foundations for further successes since there are so many analogous situations that arise in practice,” he adds.
The company Temperatures.com, Inc. grew out of the website in 2001 and the Web’s remarkable ability to communicate with people world-wide. Ray, a physicist, had just been officially retired from the LTV Steel Company, shortly before it sank into bankruptcy. He had been their corporate staff specialist on temperature measurement for nearly 13 years. His more complete profile is listed on Linkedin.com.
Two of his sons, Matt & Mike, were already involved in their own work on the Internet and earlier urged him to learn HTML and create a website; it was the “wave of the future” as Matt told him.
Ray knew when he started the website in his spare time in 1996 as a part-time effort, that there was a great deal of information on the Web, but it was (and still is) of varying quality, widely scattered and difficult for someone unfamiliar with the material to evaluate.
Rather than rewriting the “good stuff”, all that was needed, he reasoned, was to find it and index it along with comments and additional content to put items in an understandable and useful context. He started with the free web space he had on his personal Internet account at the time, Netcom, to collect, vet and organize the information available.
Even in 1996, there was a huge amount of useful information on the Web.
Over the intervening years, this site grew like Jack’s proverbial beanstalk, upward and further upward. Hits on the Web site have grown, too, as the Web has grown. It has been ranked Number 1 and Number 2 on Google searches for “temperature sensors” and many related technical terms for several years.
The original website has more than 300 pages and is still online as a collection of seperate pages.
In January 2010, the site was expanded with the addition of a Content Management System (CMS) based on the Open Source software WordPress. This improved version has updated content and features a database driven content model.
It now has available comment features for feedback on every page and article. The vendor databases are now seperate, searchable and easily expanded.
Many sensor and related products makers and sellers strive to be listed in this site’s vendor pages, claiming it is the one consistent source of traffic to their sites. It costs money to be listed, but not a great amount.
