John Dalton
John Dalton
John Dalton (1766–1844) was an English chemist, physicist and meteorologist who developed the modern atomic theory. Born into a Quaker family in Cumberland, he was teaching at a village school by the age of twelve and remained a teacher for much of his life, later settling in Manchester. A careful observer, he kept daily weather records for more than fifty years and in 1794 gave one of the first scientific descriptions of color blindness, a condition he shared, which became known as Daltonism. His studies of gases led to the law of partial pressures. His turning point came in the early 1800s, when he proposed that each element consists of atoms of a characteristic weight and that compounds form when atoms combine in simple whole-number ratios, set out in A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808). The dalton, a unit of atomic mass, is named in his honor.
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Founders of Modern Chemistry
Antoine Lavoisier established the law of conservation of mass and gave oxygen and hydrogen their names, turning chemistry into a precise science. John Dalton proposed the modern atomic theory in the early 1800s, explaining chemical combination through atoms with characteristic weights. Michael Faraday, trained in the laboratory of Humphry Davy, discovered benzene and formulated the laws of electrolysis. Dmitri Mendeleev arranged the elements into the periodic table in 1869 and predicted elements not yet discovered.
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