With some things, it's easy to picture how measurements came to exist. Length is easy to measure, weight probably started with scales, then people chose to use a certain sized object as a standard for the scale, then that became a measurement. But temperature isn't so easy to measure quantitatively, so when, and how, did the first quantitative measurements of temperature come to be?
There's a good 3 part documentary by the BBC called: Precession: the measure of all things. One of the episodes (I think it was 3) was about temperature.