All cold-blooded creatures, crickets included, follow the Arrhenius equation, which states that the rate of a chemical reaction depends on the surrounding temperature. Muscle contractions, like those that let a cricket chirp, occur through chemical reactions taking place in the body. So the colder it is outside, the slower the chemical reactions in a cricket's muscles, and the less frequent its chirps. When it's hotter outside, a cricket chirps more frequently.

The fact that crickets have no mechanism for controlling the internal temperature of their bodies (like humans do) means that they are not physically capable of changing the frequency of their chirps on their own. This correlation is predictable enough for you to accurately determine the temperature outside the moment you wake up, without even opening your eyes:

Degrees Fahrenheit = 50 + (chirps per minute - 40)/4

Amos Emerson Dolbear was a highly accomplished physicist and inventor who, had two key moments in his life gone slightly differently, could have become a household name like Thomas Edison or Samuel Morse. He invented the first telephone receiver in 1865, 11 years before Alexander Graham Bell, but failed to observe the correct patent office formalities and couldn't prove his claim when Bell applied for the same patent later on.

Dolbear attempted to secure the patent but lost the case before the United States Supreme Court in 1888. To be fair, Dolbear's case against Bell was just one of more than six hundred lawsuits against the Bell Telephone Company, which historians of American patent law call the Telephone Cases. At the time, it was obvious that telephones were the next big thing, and major interests like Western Union (the world's biggest communications company at the time, thanks to the telegraph) wanted in on it.

Although Dolbear learned his lesson and made sure to patent an 1882 invention he made for sending wireless telegraph signals through the Earth, the patent was bought out in 1899 and used to unsuccessfully attack Guglielmo Marconi's later patent for atmospheric electromagnetic radio transmission. The presiding judge decided that Dolbear's underground wireless technology was fundamentally different than Marconi's and threw out the case.

But Dolbear's life wasn't all bad news: He was recognized for his scientific contributions while he was alive, earning prestigious achievement awards at both the Paris Exhibition of 1881 and the Great Exhibition at London's Crystal Palace in 1882. He also authored several well-received books and earned a professorship at Bethany College in West Virginia. Even still, the one lasting contribution to carry Dolbear's name through the ages is an obscure scientific law about cricket chirps.

Get stories like this one in your inbox or your headphones: Sign up for our daily email and subscribe to the Curiosity Daily podcast.

For more inventor drama, check out Edward Ball's "The Inventor and the Tycoon: A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures," a riveting true life/true crime narrative of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads. The audiobook is free with an Audible trial. We handpick reading recommendations we think you may like. If you choose to make a purchase, Curiosity will get a share of the sale.