text: The term "pyrometer" was coined in the 1730s by Pieter van Musschenbroek, better known as the inventor of the Leyden jar. His device, of which no surviving specimens are known, may be now called a dilatometer because it measured the dilation of a metal rod.
  The earliest example of a pyrometer thought to be in existence is the [https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co1668/hindleys-pyrometer-pyrometers-dilatometers Hindley Pyrometer] held by the London Science Museum, dating from 1752, produced for the Royal collection. The pyrometer was a well known enough instrument that it was described in some detail by the mathematician Euler in 1760.
  Around 1782 potter Josiah Wedgwood invented a different type of pyrometer (or rather a pyrometric device) to measure the temperature in his kilns, which first compared the color of clay fired at known temperatures, but was eventually upgraded to measuring the shrinkage of pieces of clay, which depended on kiln temperature (see Wedgwood scale for details). Later examples used the expansion of a metal bar.
  In 1860s–1870s brothers William and Werner Siemens developed a platinum resistance thermometer, initially to measure temperature in undersea cables, but then adapted for measuring temperatures in metallurgy up to 1000 °C, hence deserving a name of a pyrometer.
  The first disappearing-filament pyrometer was built by L. Holborn and F. Kurlbaum in 1901. This device had a thin electrical filament between an observer's eye and an incandescent object. The current through the filament was adjusted until it was of the same colour (and hence temperature) as the object, and no longer visible; it was calibrated to allow temperature to be inferred from the current.
  The temperature returned by the vanishing-filament pyrometer and others of its kind, called brightness pyrometers, is dependent on the emissivity of the object. With greater use of brightness pyrometers, it became obvious that problems existed with relying on knowledge of the value of emissivity. Emissivity was found to change, often drastically, with surface roughness, bulk and surface composition, and even the temperature itself.
  To get around these difficulties, the ratio or two-color pyrometer was developed. They rely on the fact that Plancks law, which relates temperature to the intensity of radiation emitted at individual wavelengths, can be solved for temperature if Plancks statement of the intensities at two different wavelengths is divided. This solution assumes that the emissivity is the same at both wavelengths and cancels out in the division. This is known as the gray-body assumption. Ratio pyrometers are essentially two brightness pyrometers in a single instrument. The operational principles of the ratio pyrometers were developed in the 1920s and 1930s, and they were commercially available in 1939.
  As the ratio pyrometer came into popular use, it was determined that many materials, of which metals are an example, do not have the same emissivity at two wavelengths. For these materials, the emissivity does not cancel out, and the temperature measurement is in error. The amount of error depends on the emissivities and the wavelengths where the measurements are taken. Two-color ratio pyrometers cannot measure whether a material's emissivity is wavelength-dependent.
  To more accurately measure the temperature of real objects with unknown or changing emissivities, multiwavelength pyrometers were envisioned at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology and described in 1992. Multiwavelength pyrometers use three or more wavelengths and mathematical manipulation of the results to attempt to achieve accurate temperature measurement even when the emissivity is unknown, changing or differs according to wavelength of measurement.