As many do in frigid winter weather, mariner was playing with his array of electric heaters and gas furnace to accommodate a comfortable home as inexpensively as possible. After a few weeks, he found a good temperature in the mid seventies and generally was able to focus heat on one floor at a time. This routine reduces expense.

The exercise led to mariner wondering how in the dickens does his own body sustain 98.6° F? Well, it requires 60,000 miles of arteries, veins and capillaries – an incredibly extensive circulatory system that also feeds the body! He then wondered what was the source of body heat? The human body has no chords of wood, truckloads of coal or natural gas pipelines.

Generally, heat is generated during digestion, physical activity, chemical processing by organs like the liver and activity motivated by hormonal interaction. Where’s the thermometer? It’s name is hypothalamus. It lives in the brain. We all know how the body cools itself – by tossing warm water called perspiration (aka ‘sweat’) out through pores in the skin. If the weather is really hot or body functions are working hard, the body needs some extra water to replace perspiration. One should drink two glasses of water every day, maybe more if the body is pregnant or nursing.

So instead of charcoal and wood, the human body uses heat generated by various sorts of chemical functions between cells and various ions Get out the magnifying glass; the rest of the story is pure chemistry.

Going further on body heat is too detailed for a short essay. Instead, just recall those chemical diagrams from Chemistry Class. Mariner mentioned ‘cells’. There are 30 trillion cells in the human body.

Ancient Mariner