John Dalton Street. Dalton’s Law. Dalton Hall, Dalton scholarships, the Dalton medal, the Dalton prize, Daltonism. Who was this man, Dalton?
John Dalton was born in 1766, to a poor Quaker family in the countryside of the Lake District. His early years were dominated by the austerity of his family and faith. From unpromising beginnings, with hard work, brilliance and good fortune, he rose, largely self-taught, to become a scientist and polymath celebrated not only in Manchester and the Northwest, but nationally and internationally. He is one of the fathers of modern chemistry. Statues of him stand outside the John Dalton Building at Manchester Metropolitan University, and in the Manchester Town Hall. The Dalton Nuclear Institute at Manchester University leads research into nuclear science.
Early Life and Background
John’s father was a weaver with a smallholding in the village of Eaglesfield, near Cockermouth, in what was then the county of Cumberland. Although he had to work on the land as a child, he was also taught by John Fletcher, in Pardshaw, a nearby village, in the Quaker schoolhouse which still exists. While there he was fortunate to be brought to the attention of Elihu Robinson, a rather better-off Quaker farmer and landowner, who had become an amateur meteorologist and accumulated a significant library. He took the young Dalton under his wing and taught him mathematics in the evening. When John was twelve, he began a school of his own in Eaglesfield, where it is said his pupils varied from infants to those older than himself.
At fifteen he joined his older brother Jonathan, teaching at the Quakers’ Academy in Kendal, where their cousin George Bewley was headmaster. Bewley retired in 1785, Jonathan and John becoming joint heads. By the time he was twenty-one John was offering a course of lectures including mechanics, optics and astronomy.
In Kendal, Dalton came to the attention of John Gough, again a Quaker, who despite having very poor vision after childhood smallpox, had acquired a reputation as a great intellectual and mathematician. He became Dalton’s mentor and also taught him Greek, Latin and French. Gough had become an active member of the Manchester Literary & Philosophical Society. After some years, Gough felt that it was time for Dalton to move on. He recommended him for the post of tutor in mathematics and natural philosophy at New College in Manchester, in 1793. Dalton taught there for seven years and then resigned to become a private tutor and scientist. It was time for his brilliance to show.
Key Contributions and Achievements
The concept that all materials are composed of atoms is ancient. Dalton was the first to postulate that each element had different atoms which varied in mass. He calculated the atomic masses of various elements and created the first list of elements in order of atomic weight that would later, after addition and organisation by others including Mendeleev, become what we now know as the periodic table. He discovered the Law of Multiple Proportions, which dictated that elements could join to form compounds only in fixed ratios. He also did extensive experimental work on gases and Dalton’s Law of Partial Pressures was one result. With these and other contributions he laid several of the foundations of modern physical chemistry. His most important work, A New System of Chemical Philosophy, published in 1808, was dedicated to the Manchester Lit & Phil.
Dalton began to study the weather as a boy in Cumberland, guided by the amateur meteorologist John Gough. He made his own thermometers and barometers. From then until the day before his death in 1844 he diligently kept a daily meteorological diary and it has been said that he made over 200,000 observations on barometric pressure, temperature, storm behaviour, and the aurora borealis. He published Meteorological Observations and Essays aged only 27. He holidayed in the Lake District, not in a leisurely way, but climbing many fells to ascertain their altitude using his barometer, the results being carefully recorded.
He also found time for amateur botany, initially taught by Gough. He collected and dried the flora of Cumberland in two volumes containing 864 species, the first of which, dated 1791, glorifies in the name Hortus Siccus: seu Plantarum diversarum in Agris Kendal vicinis sponte nascentium Specimina. Opere et Studio Joannis Dalton collecta. Both volumes are now at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Edinburgh. He also formed an 11-volume personal herbarium which was destroyed by bombing of the Lit & Phil archives in the Manchester blitz. It was his close study of the flora that persuaded him that he was colour-blind.
Impact on Manchester and Beyond
Dalton became highly respected both nationally and internationally. As early as 1803 he was invited to give a series of lectures at the Royal Institution in London. Sir Humphrey Davy invited him in 1810 to apply for fellowship of the Royal Society, but he declined. He was eventually persuaded in 1822, becoming FRS, then and now the highest scientific accolade in the United Kingdom. He was the first recipient of that society’s Royal Medal, awarded for the most important contributions to the advancement of “Natural Knowledge”. He received honorary doctorates from both Oxford and Cambridge Universities. His reputation was also international: he was elected a member of the French Académie des Sciences in 1816 and an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1834. His scientific contributions were great enough for the government of Earl Grey to confer a national pension of £300 per annum for him. He is regarded internationally as one of the fathers of chemistry.
In 1860 an imagined group of distinguished British men of science assembled in the library of the Royal Institution, London was created and engraved by Walker and Zobel.
It shows a large gathering, with John Dalton seated, legs crossed, at the centre table, his closest colleagues being Sir Humphrey Davy and Henry Cavendish. It was a clear illustration of the reverence in which he was by then held.
The Pre-Raphaelite artist Ford Madox Brown was commissioned to paint twelve murals to adorn the walls of the great hall of Manchester Town Hall. These magnificent pictures, painted between 1879 and 1893, include Dalton Collecting Marsh Fire Gas (methane), showing the great man at a countryside pond, obtaining more material for experimentation.
In September 2003 Hansard, the record of UK Government procedures, contained this entry: “This House records the 200th Anniversary of John Dalton’s greatest achievement which was his Atomic Theory; notes that this first established clear and quantitative principles to determine the composition of all materials; further notes that his scientific theory was first advanced in an historic address to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1803; further notes that Dalton’s scientific theory marked the end of alchemy and laid ‘the great foundation stone of chemical science’. An appropriate tribute to a great Manchester scientist.
The Manchester Lit & Phil
Dalton was elected to Manchester Lit & Phil membership in 1794, soon after he arrived in Manchester, and within weeks he presented his first paper, on his hypothesis of colour blindness: Extraordinary Facts Relating to the Vision of Colours: With Observations. It was with the assistance of the Society that he obtained a room for teaching and research at its premises on George Street, where he equipped a laboratory. By 1800 he was Secretary of the Society, and shortly afterwards began a series of presentations on chemistry entitled Experimental Essays. In 1816 was elected President of the Manchester Lit & Phil. He held that post for 28 years, until his death, the longest-serving President in the history of the Society. During his time as a member, he presented more than 100 scientific papers to its audiences.
After his death, John Dalton’s manuscripts were kept by the Manchester Lit & Phil until 1979 when those items not destroyed in the 1941 Manchester Blitz passed to the John Rylands Library of the University of Manchester.
The Dalton Medal, the highest honour given by the Manchester Lit & Phil, has been awarded only 16 times since its introduction in 1898, to some of the greatest names in British science including Lord Rutherford, Sir Bernard Lovell, Sir Roger Penrose and Sir Martin Rees. The latest award in 2023 was to Sir Paul Nurse OM CH FRS, Nobel prize-winner and Director of the Crick Institute. Dalton medals are also awarded by the Royal Society of Chemistry and the European Geosciences Union.
Colour Blindness
John Dalton knew that he could not see colours properly; in particular, red looked brown. His brother was similarly affected. Dalton had two theories: firstly, that the disease was inherited, which was correct, and secondly that the fluid inside his eye was blue, rather than clear. Before his death he asked his doctor, Joseph Ransome, to remove his eyes and check. After Dalton’s death in 1844 Ransome did so but found that the fluid was entirely clear (or “perfectly pellucid”). The eyes were kept by the Manchester Lit & Phil and in 1995 it was possible to perform genetic tests on a small remaining sample. This showed that Dalton had deuteranopia, a form of x-linked inherited green-red colour blindness. Dalton had been amongst the first to discuss possible causes of these disorders, which are still sometimes referred to as “Daltonism”. His eyes remain in the care of the Manchester Science and Industry Museum.
Legacy and Inspiration
John Dalton lived in an age when it was possible for the well-educated to contribute to several fields within the broad scientific range of “natural philosophy”. To have risen to that status of a true polymath from such obscure beginnings is a tribute to his intelligence, to his perpetually enquiring mind, and perhaps most of all to his astonishing persistence in the collection of data and the many years of hard work that entailed. He became reputed for his work in chemistry, physics, meteorology and hydrology. He was clearly a reserved, insular man dedicated to his experiments. He never married and had few real friends. For the quarter of a century before his death he lived simply, as a boarder in the house of Rev Johns (also a published botanist) in George Street, Manchester, close to his laboratory at the Manchester Lit & Phil, the centre of his working life. After his death, forty thousand people attended his lying-in and funeral procession in Manchester. In Manchester Town Hall sit two statues, opposite each other, of John Dalton and his best-known pupil, James Prescott Joule. Two years after his death, John Dalton Street was named after him by Manchester Corporation.
His name is known by scientists worldwide and he is rightly regarded as one of the great scientists of the nineteenth century.
Nick Jones, member of Manchester Lit & Phil