John Dalton Biography | Animated Video | Discovered the Atomic Theory

Born on September 6, 1766 in the small community of Eaglesfield in England, John Dalton was the son of Joseph Dalton, who was a poor weaver that was fortunate to own a house on a small patch of land, and his wife, Deborah Greenup, who had come from a rich Quaker family in the same country and had married for love. Both Joseph and Deborah were known as Quakers. Quakers were technically Christians but according to the Church of England at the time, they were seen as dissenters whose ideology came from a single verse in the New Testament of the Bible. This would later affect John's opportunity in attaining higher education because he was then restricted to educational institutions that supported the Quaker movement. As a child, John was quite intelligent and he took interest in the world around him and tried as much as possible to learn everything he could about everything the world had to offer. Until he turned 11 years old, John received his education from Joseph as well as attending the Quaker community school in Pardshaw Hall run by a man called John Fletcher, after which he started helping as a teacher because his family was too poor to continue to support his education. When he turned 15, John opted to help Jonathan, his elder brother, in running a Quaker boarding school that was located at least 40 miles from their family home in the town of Kendal. During that period, he did not neglect his education and continued to teach himself subjects like Greek, Latin, Mathematics, French and Science. Four years later, John was promoted to school principal because the students thoroughly enjoyed his gentler disposition and adherence to excellence, a role he excelled in for a few years until he turned 26. It was somewhere around this time that John started a meteorological diary for recording the weather and for the next 57 years, he would record at least 20,000 weather observations. Around the year 1790, John had the idea to study medicine or law but because of his background as a Quaker and therefore a dissenter, an organization that was seen to oppose the Church of England, his applications were rejected from the universities. Not to mention, his family also did not support his choice, possibly because they could not afford his higher education. However, John believed he had the right idea to pursue further study but perhaps it was not yet the right time, so he recalled a man he had looked up to in his younger days, Elihu Robinson. At the time, Robinson was quite a prominent Quaker and a successful meteorologist. It was his bold achievements that influenced John's interest in meteorology and mathematics. Another man had instilled in him a lot of scientific knowledge by the way of informal instruction during this period was a blind philosopher who was talented in arts and science, a man called John Goe. In early 1793, John accepted a post as a lecturer of natural philosophy and mathematics at New College, a dissenting institution that provided jobs to religious candidates who had higher education in Manchester, England. That same year, he published his first book based on his observations of meteorological subjects which were called Meteorological Observations and Essays. This book then became the foundations of the discoveries he would publish later in his life, even though, at the time, other scholars paid little attention to it. By the next year, John wrote his first scientific paper, known as Extraordinary Facts Relating to the Vision of Colors, which became the first write-up on the issue of colorblindness or color perception of the eye. At the time, John thought that the condition was hereditary, as both he and his family members suffered from it. John's theory was, in fact, wrong, but because he was the first person to study the condition, along with his thorough and methodical study of the condition which became widely recognized, it was soon called Daltonism. But John was just getting started. He published more scientific papers in the area of physical sciences covering topics like light properties, conduction of heat, meteorology, gas expansion by heat, and even the aurora borealis. By 1800, New College ran into financial difficulties, and John resigned from his role as a lecturer, choosing instead to work as a private teacher of mathematics and science. That same year, John participated in an oral presentation on the details of his experiments on gases and the nature and composition of air as they related to atmospheric pressures. The presentation was titled Experimental Essays. In 1801, John proposed a theory that became known as Dalton's Law of Partial Pressures, or more simply as Dalton's Law, and which is still being used by practically every chemistry university student as well as scuba divers today to measure the level of pressure and their effects on nitrogen and air levels at different depths of the ocean. Throughout that same year, in Manchester, John gave a series of groundbreaking presentations, though the contents weren't published until 1802. In those presentations, John once again presented his studies into liquids and gases, and it gave new insights into the nature of gases. The statement he made about the fact that when the volume of a gas is held constant in a container, the pressure varies in direct proportion to its temperature. This bold statement was published a few years later in 1809 and was referred to as Gay-Lussac's Law after the fellow who published it, Joseph Gay-Lussac. By this point in time, John's work had distinguished him as a first-rank scientist, but it still came as a bit of a surprise when he was invited to give presentations at the Royal Institution in London, despite his Quaker background. John had beat all odds with his hard work and dedication until he was recognized by the very institutions that had rejected him long ago. Throughout his life, John remained a faithful Quaker, and was unmarried with no children. In 1810, he was invited to become a member of the Royal Society, but he declined. In the early 1800s, John's study of gases led him to wonder what those invisible substances were made of. The idea, relating to atoms, had first been proposed in ancient Greece by Democritus over 2,000 years before his time. Democritus figured that every single thing were made up of tiny particles, known as atoms, which were the smallest particles in existence. But was he right or wrong? John challenged himself to solve this 2,000-year-old mystery. He carried out various chemical reactions and soon published a book in 1808 called A New System of Chemical Philosophy. The accumulation of the chemical experiments that John did became what we now know as Dalton's Atomic Fury, which became the foundation of modern chemistry and still holds today. Between 1814 and 1819, an Irish chemist by the name of William Higgins accused Dalton of plagiarizing his ideas for the Atomic Fury, but it was discovered that William's theory had no reference to relative atomic mass, unlike John's theory. In 1822, without his knowledge, John was elected into the Royal Society for his Atomic Fury. John was awarded the Society's Royal Medal. At the age of 71, John experienced a slight stroke, but recovered. One year later, he suffered a more severe one that affected his speech, such that he couldn't speak clearly like before. Five years later, in 1844, John suffered from another stroke that killed him. So high was his reputation and contribution to the scientific community that John's body was placed in the town hall in Manchester and at least 40,000 people came to pay their respects. Thank you very much for watching our videos. We'll like to give you another interesting video for you to enjoy next but before then, our team will be very happy if you like this video and share it with your friends on social media. If you're new here, don't forget to subscribe so you won't miss other interesting videos like this. Look at your screen now to see two other videos we handpicked for you to enjoy next. We love you