Skip to main content Skip to Search Box

Definition: Dalton, John from Philip's Encyclopedia

English chemist, physicist, and meteorologist. He researched trade winds, the cause of rain, and the aurora borealis. He described colour blindness based on personal experience. His study of gases led to Dalton's law of partial pressures: the total pressure of a gas mixture is equal to the sum of the partial pressures of the individual gases, provided no chemical reaction occurs. His atomic theory states that each element is made up of indestructible, small particles. He also constructed a table of relative atomic masses.


Dalton, John (1766-1844)

From The Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography
Place: United Kingdom, England Subject : biography, chemistry English chemist, one of the founders of atomic theory. Some of his proposals have since proved to be incorrect, but his chief contribution was that he channelled the thinking of contemporary scientists along the correct lines, particularly in his method of using established facts to explain a new phenomenon. Dalton was born in the village of Eaglesfield near Cockermouth, Cumbria, on or about 6 September 1766. He was the third of six children of a weaver, who was a devout Quaker and did not register the date of his son's birth. Dalton attended the village Quaker school and by the age of 12 was running it. He later became headmaster of a school in Kendal, before taking up a post in 1793 to teach mathematics and natural philosophy in Manchester. Dalton was largely self-taught, his Quaker beliefs excluding him from attending Oxford or Cambridge universities (at that time open only to members of the Church of England). Even…
211 results

Full text Article Dalton, John

From Philip's Encyclopedia
| 89 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article DALTON, JOHN 1766-1844

From Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850
John Dalton, probably the most gifted scientist working in northern England in the early-nineteenth century, was the first scientist to establish a quantitative chemical system based on an atomic theory. Unlike most English scientists, who were Anglicans and working in London, Dalton was a Quaker…
| 1,326 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article Dalton, John (1766-1844)

From The Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography
Place: United Kingdom, England Subject : biography, chemistry English chemist, one of the founders of atomic theory. Some of his proposals have since proved to be incorrect, but his chief contribution was that he channelled the thinking of contemporary scientists along the correct lines, …
| 867 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article Dalton, John (1766–1844).

From The Oxford Companion to British History
Chemist, atomist, quaker, and Manchester intellectual, Dalton's first interests were in meteorology and in colour blindness: being colour blind himself, he made the first scientific study of the phenomenon. From 1794 he worked at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, taking private…
| 135 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article Dalton, John (1766–1844).

From Hawley's Condensed Chemical Dictionary
The first theorist since the Greek philosopher Democritus to conceive of matter in terms of small particles. The founder of the atomic theory on which all succeeding chemical investigation has been based (1807). His essential concept of the indivisibility of the atom was not called into question…
| 100 words
Key concepts:
| 60 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article SCIENCE, FIELD OF

From Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations
American philosopher The field of science, however, is large, for it is nothing less than the whole world, the infinite universe in which we live; and the experiences which we make by studying the various phenomena of our surroundings are illimitable and inexhaustible. Is All Science One? The…
| 260 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article PROPORTION

From Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations
English chemist and physicist The doctrine of definite proportions appears to me mysterious unless we adopt the atomic hypothesis. It appears like the mystical ratios of Kepler, which Newton so happily elucidated. The prosecution of the investigation can terminate, I conceive, in nothing but in the…
| 300 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article EVAPORATION

From Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations
Greek lyric poet The sea drinks the air, the sun Drinks the sea,… Translated by Stanley, Thomas Anacreon The Need of Drinking (p. 23 ) Merrill & Baker. New York New York USA . 1899. English novelist, essayist, and critic Evaporation is an unseen heave... …
| 342 words
Key concepts:

Full text Article HYDROGEN

From Gaither's Dictionary of Scientific Quotations
To understand hydrogen is to understand all of physics. Source undetermined. Italian writer and novelist When I was a kid, the only playthings we had in the whole universe were the hydrogen atoms, and we played with them all the time, I and another youngster my age whose name was Pfwfp. What sort of…
| 327 words
Key concepts:
Mind Map

Stack overflow
More Library Resources