John Dalton was born in Eaglesfield, England, on September 6, 1766 into a Quaker family. Dalton attended school until the age of twelve and then became a teacher and taught for the rest of his life. In 1794, Dalton published a scientific paper on color-blindness, a disease that he personally suffered from. Due to his research color blindness became know a daltonism.
Dalton became interested in sciences when a friend introduced him to meteorology. In
1787, Dalton started daily recordings of weather observations. His observations came to have over 200,000 items, as Dalton kept thinking about the atmosphere and its make-up. In 1803 Dalton published his law of partial pressures known as Dalton's Law.
Dalton's Law says that when different gases combine, the resulting pressure will be the sum of what each gas gives individually.
What experiments were used and what did Dalton learn?
It was in the early 1800s that John Dalton came up with his atomic theory. Before that, less than twenty years earlier, in the 1780's, Lavoisier created a new chemical era by making careful quantitative measurements that allowed the compositions of compounds to be determined with accuracy. By 1799 enough data had been accumulated to establish the Law of Constant Composition, which is a chemical compound that always contains the same elements, also in the same proportions of mass. In 1803 Dalton noted that oxygen and carbon combined to make two compounds. Each had its own particular weight ratio of oxygen to carbon, but also, for the same amount of carbon, one had exactly twice as much oxygen as the other. This led him to propose the Law of Simple Multiple Proportions, which was later verified by the
Swedish chemist Berzelius. He attempted to explain how and why elements would combine with one another in fixed ratios and sometimes also in multiples of those ratios and by doing this Dalton formulated his atomic theory.
What experiments were used and what did Dalton learn?
The ancient Greek philosophers had talked about atoms, but Dalton's theory was different in