32 Facts About John Dalton

John Dalton was an English chemist, physicist and meteorologist.

John Dalton is best known for introducing the atomic theory into chemistry, and for his research into colour blindness, which he had.

John Dalton was born into a Quaker family in Eaglesfield, near Cockermouth, in Cumberland, England.

John Dalton received his early education from his father and from Quaker John Fletcher, who ran a private school in the nearby village of Pardshaw Hall.

John Dalton's family was too poor to support him for long and he began to earn his living, from the age of ten, in the service of wealthy local Quaker Elihu Robinson.

When he was 15, John Dalton joined his older brother Jonathan in running a Quaker school in Kendal, Westmorland, about 45 miles from his home.

John Dalton acquired much scientific knowledge from informal instruction by John Gough, a blind philosopher who was gifted in the sciences and arts.

John Dalton remained for seven years when the college's worsening financial situation led to his resignation.

John Dalton began a new career as a private tutor in the same two subjects.

John Dalton rediscovered George Hadley's theory of atmospheric circulation around this time.

John Dalton was often accompanied by Jonathan Otley, who made a study of the heights of the local peaks, using Dalton's figures as a comparison to check his work.

Examination of his preserved eyeball in 1995 demonstrated that John Dalton had deuteranopia, a type of Congenital red-green color blindness in which the gene for medium wavelength sensitive photopsins is missing.

Individuals with this form of colour blindness see every color as mapped to blue, yellow or gray, or, as John Dalton wrote in his seminal paper,.

In 1800, John Dalton became secretary of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, and in the following year he presented an important series of lectures, entitled "Experimental Essays" on the constitution of mixed gases; the pressure of steam and other vapours at different temperatures in a vacuum and in air; on evaporation; and on the thermal expansion of gases.

John Dalton enunciated Gay-Lussac's law, published in 1802 by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac.

Arguably the most important of all John Dalton's investigations are concerned with the atomic theory in chemistry.

From 1814 to 1819, Irish chemist William Higgins claimed that John Dalton had plagiarised his ideas, but Higgins' theory did not address relative atomic mass.

John Dalton then proposes relative weights for the atoms of a few elements, without going into further detail.

John Dalton published his first table of relative atomic weights containing six elements, relative to the weight of an atom of hydrogen conventionally taken as 1.

John Dalton provided no indication in this paper how he had arrived at these numbers, but in his laboratory notebook, dated 6 September 1803, is a list in which he set out the relative weights of the atoms of a number of elements, derived from analysis of water, ammonia, carbon dioxide, etc.

John Dalton hypothesised the structure of compounds can be represented in whole number ratios.

John Dalton used his own symbols to visually represent the atomic structure of compounds.

John Dalton published papers on such diverse topics as rain and dew and the origin of springs ; on heat, the colour of the sky, steam and the reflection and refraction of light; and on the grammatical subjects of the auxiliary verbs and participles of the English language.

John Dalton always objected to the chemical notation devised by Jons Jacob Berzelius, although most thought that it was much simpler and more convenient than his own cumbersome system of circular symbols.

John Dalton contributed 117 Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester from 1817 until his death in 1844 while president of that organisation.

John Dalton took the same course soon afterwards with four other papers, two of which contain his discovery, regarded by him as second in importance only to atomic theory, that certain anhydrates, when dissolved in water, cause no increase in its volume, his inference being that the salt enters into the pores of the water.

In 1810, Sir Humphry Davy asked him to offer himself as a candidate for the fellowship of the Royal Society, but John Dalton declined, possibly for financial reasons.

John Dalton was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1834.

John Dalton never married and had only a few close friends.

John Dalton attended several of the earlier meetings of the British Association at York, Oxford, Dublin and Bristol.

John Dalton suffered a minor stroke in 1837, and a second in 1838 left him with a speech impairment, although he remained able to perform experiments.

John Dalton's body lay in state in Manchester Town Hall for four days and more than 40,000 people filed past his coffin.