Red heat
Practice of using colours to determine the temperature of metal / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For other uses, see Red heat (disambiguation).
The practice of using colours to determine the temperature of a piece of (usually) ferrous metal comes from blacksmithing. Long before thermometers were widely available, it was necessary to know what state the metal was in for heat treating it and the only way to do this was to heat it up to a colour which was known to be best for the work.