John Dalton
John Dalton, 1766-1844, English chemist
and Fellow of the Royal
Society.
Dalton was the first to provide a scientific description of color
blindness (1794), a
condition from which he suffered and which was long called
"Daltonism."
Dalton recorded over 200,000 observations of the atmosphere in
his notebooks, and studied mixed gases and the expansion of gases
under heat; Dalton's Law is still used to describe the law of
partial pressures in chemistry. This work led him to his most
important theoretical contribution to chemistry, a scientifically
grounded atomic theory of matter. He lectured on his discoveries
in 1803, and
published them at greater length in A New System of Chemical
Philosophy in 1808.
