John Dalton (; 6 September 1766 – 27 July 1844) was an English chemist, physicist, and meteorologist. He is best known for introducing the atomic theory into chemistry, and for his research into colour blindness, sometimes referred to as Daltonism in his honour.
Introduction
John Dalton
John Dalton | Introduction
Colour blindness. He contributed 117 "Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester" from 1817 until his death in 1844 while president of that organisation. He is best known for his research into colour blindness, sometimes referred to as Daltonism in his honour. His research into colour blindness.
when was the idea of an atom first developed describe this theory
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According to this idea, if one were to take a lump of matter and cut it into ever smaller pieces, one would eventually reach a point where the pieces could not be further cut into anything smaller.
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who talked about this theory for the first time?
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John Dalton
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apart from this theory, what were his other contributions to science?
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For "Rees's Cyclopædia" Dalton contributed articles on Chemistry and Meteorology, but the topics are not known. He contributed 117 "Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester" from 1817 until his death in 1844 while president of that organisation. Of these the earlier are the most important. In one of them, read in 1814, he explains the principles of volumetric analysis, in which he was one of the earliest researchers. In 1840 a paper on phosphates and arsenates, often regarded as a weaker work, was refused by the Royal Society, and he was so incensed that he published it himself.
John Dalton | Other publications
He took the same course soon afterwards with four other papers, two of which ("On the quantity of acids, bases and salts in different varieties of salts" and "On a new and easy method of analysing sugar") contain his discovery, regarded by him as second in importance only to atomic theory, that certain anhydrates, when dissolved in water, cause no increase in its volume, his inference being that the salt enters into the pores of the water.
John Dalton | Other publications
John Dalton (1766–1844) was a scientist who pioneered modern atomic theory. John Dalton may also refer to:
John Dalton (disambiguation) | Introduction
A study of Dalton's laboratory notebooks, discovered in the rooms of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, concluded that so far from Dalton being led by his search for an explanation of the law of multiple proportions to the idea that chemical combination consists in the interaction of atoms of definite and characteristic weight, the idea of atoms arose in his mind as a purely physical concept, forced on him by study of the physical properties of the atmosphere and other gases. The first published indications of this idea are to be found at the end of his paper "On the Absorption of Gases by Water and other Liquids" already mentioned.
John Dalton | Atomic theory
John Dalton (; 6 September 1766 – 27 July 1844) was an English chemist, physicist, and meteorologist. He is best known for introducing the atomic theory into chemistry, and for his research into colour blindness, sometimes referred to as Daltonism in his honour.
John Dalton | Introduction
Dalton's early life was influenced by a prominent Quaker, Elihu Robinson, a competent meteorologist and instrument maker, from Eaglesfield, Cumbria, who interested him in problems of mathematics and meteorology. During his years in Kendal, Dalton contributed solutions to problems and answered questions on various subjects in "The Ladies' Diary" and the "Gentleman's Diary". In 1787 at age 21 he began his meteorological diary in which, during the succeeding 57 years, he entered more than 200,000 observations. He rediscovered George Hadley's theory of atmospheric circulation (now known as the Hadley cell) around this time. In 1793 Dalton's first publication, "Meteorological Observations and Essays", contained the seeds of several of his later discoveries but despite the originality of his treatment, little attention was paid to them by other scholars.
John Dalton | Meteorology
Dalton published papers on such diverse topics as rain and dew and the origin of springs (hydrosphere); on heat, the colour of the sky, steam and the reflection and refraction of light; and on the grammatical subjects of the auxiliary verbs and participles of the English language.
John Dalton | Other investigations
In 1803, English meteorologist and chemist John Dalton proposed Dalton's law, which describes the relationship between the components in a mixture of gases and the relative pressure each contributes to that of the overall mixture. Discovered in 1801, this concept is also known as Dalton's law of partial pressures. Dalton also proposed a modern atomic theory in 1803 which stated that all matter was composed of small indivisible particles termed atoms, atoms of a given element possess unique characteristics and weight, and three types of atoms exist: simple (elements), compound (simple molecules), and complex (complex molecules). In 1808, Dalton first published "New System of Chemical Philosophy" (1808-1827), in which he outlined the first modern scientific description of the atomic theory.
History of chemistry | John Dalton
by chemists of the time. The extension of this idea to substances in general necessarily led him to the law of multiple proportions, and the comparison with experiment brilliantly confirmed his deduction. In the paper "On the Proportion of the Several Gases in the Atmosphere", read by him in November 1802, the law of multiple proportions appears to be anticipated in the words: But there is reason to suspect that this sentence may have been added some time after the reading of the paper, which was not published until 1805.
John Dalton | Atomic weights
John Dalton, was born in Cumberland in 1766, a promising young scientist he moved to Manchester in 1793. He hypothesised the idea of "colour blindness", a theory which was alien to all as it had not been formally talked about before. Dalton hypothesised the idea from his own experience, as he suffered from discoloured eyesight himself. Dalton would go on to propose the Dalton atomic theory in which he hypothesised that elements were made of small particles called atoms. Manchester Liverpool Road is a former railway station on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in Manchester, which opened on 15 September 1830.
Science and engineering in Manchester | 19th century
In 1822 he was proposed without his knowledge, and on election paid the usual fee. Six years previously he had been made a corresponding member of the French Académie des Sciences, and in 1830 he was elected as one of its eight foreign associates in place of Davy. In 1833, Earl Grey's government conferred on him a pension of £150, raised in 1836 to £300. Dalton was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1834. A young James Prescott Joule, who later studied and published (1843) on the nature of heat and its relationship to mechanical work, was a pupil of Dalton in his last years.
John Dalton | Public life
John Dalton was an English chemist who developed the idea of atomic theory of chemical elements. Dalton's atomic theory of chemical elements assumed that each element had unique atoms associated with and specific to that atom. This was in opposition to Lavoisier's definition of elements which was that elements are substances that chemists could not break down further into simpler parts. Dalton's idea also differed from the idea of corpuscular theory of matter, which believed that all atoms were the same, and had been a supported theory since the 17th century. To help support his idea, Dalton worked on defining the relative weights of atoms in chemicals in his work "New System of Chemical Philosophy," published in 1808.
Chemical revolution | John Dalton
There he says:
John Dalton | Atomic theory
Despite the importance of the work as the first view of atoms as physically real entities and introduction of a system of chemical symbols, "New System of Chemical Philosophy" devoted almost as much space to the caloric theory as to atomism.
History of chemistry | John Dalton
The most important of all Dalton's investigations are concerned with the atomic theory in chemistry. While his name is inseparably associated with this theory, the origin of Dalton's atomic theory is not fully understood. The theory may have been suggested to him either by researches on ethylene ("olefiant gas") and methane ("carburetted hydrogen") or by analysis of nitrous oxide ("protoxide of azote") and nitrogen dioxide ("deutoxide of azote"), both views resting on the authority of Thomas Thomson. From 1814 to 1819, Irish chemist William Higgins claimed that Dalton had plagiarised his ideas, but Higgins' theory did not address relative atomic mass.
John Dalton | Atomic theory
Dalton's books included "The Treatise on Human Physiology". and the "Topographical Anatomy of the Brain". The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected Dalton as a member in 1864.
John Call Dalton | Publications
Even before he had propounded the atomic theory, Dalton had attained a considerable scientific reputation. In 1803, he was chosen to give a series of lectures on natural philosophy at the Royal Institution in London, and he delivered another series of lectures there in 1809–1810. Some witnesses reported that he was deficient in the qualities that make an attractive lecturer, being harsh and indistinct in voice, ineffective in the treatment of his subject, and singularly wanting in the language and power of illustration. In 1810, Sir Humphry Davy asked him to offer himself as a candidate for the fellowship of the Royal Society, but Dalton declined, possibly for financial reasons.
John Dalton | Public life
However, recent evidence suggests that Dalton's development of thought may have been influenced by the ideas of another Irish chemist Bryan Higgins, who was William's uncle. Bryan believed that an atom was a heavy central particle surrounded by an atmosphere of caloric, the supposed substance of heat at the time. The size of the atom was determined by the diameter of the caloric atmosphere. Based on the evidence, Dalton was aware of Bryan's theory and adopted very similar ideas and language, but he never acknowledged Bryan's anticipation of his caloric model. However, the essential novelty of Dalton's atomic theory is that he provided a method of calculating relative atomic weights for the chemical elements, something that neither Bryan nor William Higgins did; his priority for that crucial step is uncontested.
John Dalton | Atomic theory
Though his work was almost entirely theoretical, the practical value of Gibbs's contributions became evident with the development of industrial chemistry during the first half of the 20th century. According to Robert A. Millikan, in pure science, Gibbs "did for statistical mechanics and thermodynamics what Laplace did for celestial mechanics and Maxwell did for electrodynamics, namely, made his field a well-nigh finished theoretical structure."
Josiah Willard Gibbs | Introduction
The invention jointly made with Thomas Wheelock of a calcium based sorbent for coal gas desulphurization, introduction of zeolite catalysts, the development of a xylene isomerization process and a new methodology for the alkylation of benzene with alcohols are some of his other contributions. It was at the tissue culture pilot plant established by him where a method of propagation of bamboo by tissue culture was identified for the first time.
L. K. Doraiswamy | Scientific contributions
Dalton assisted Gough by reading, writing, and making calculations and diagrams on his behalf. In return Dalton, who later became one of the most eminent figures in nineteenth-century science, was tutored by Gough in Latin and Greek. Dalton later referred to Gough as a "prodigy in scientific attainments." In 1800 at the parish church of Kendal, Gough married Mary (d. 1858), daughter of Thomas Harrison of Crosthwaite, Cumberland. On their marriage they moved to Middleshaw in the hamlet of Old Hutton. John and Mary Gough had nine children, one of whom, Thomas Gough (18041880) became a surgeon in Kendal.
John Gough (natural philosopher) | Life
Michael Faraday was another early worker, whose major contribution to chemistry was electrochemistry, in which (among other things) a certain quantity of electricity during electrolysis or electrodeposition of metals was shown to be associated with certain quantities of chemical elements, and fixed quantities of the elements therefore with each other, in specific ratios. These findings, like those of Dalton's combining ratios, were early clues to the atomic nature of matter.
History of chemistry | 19th century
John Dalton's original atomic hypothesis presumed that all elements were monatomic and that the atoms in compounds would normally have the simplest atomic ratios with respect to one another. For example, Dalton assumed that water's formula was HO, leading to the conclusion that the atomic mass of oxygen was 8 times that of hydrogen, instead of the modern value of about 16. In 1805, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac and Alexander von Humboldt showed that water is formed of two volumes of hydrogen and one volume of oxygen; and by 1811 Amedeo Avogadro had arrived at the correct interpretation of water's composition, based on what is now called Avogadro's law and the diatomic elemental molecules in those gases.
Oxygen | Later history
This work identified chemical elements as a specific type of atom, therefore rejecting Newton's theory of chemical affinities. Instead, Dalton inferred proportions of elements in compounds by taking ratios of the weights of reactants, setting the atomic weight of hydrogen to be identically one. Following Jeremias Benjamin Richter (known for introducing the term "stoichiometry"), he proposed that chemical elements combine in integral ratios. This is known as the law of multiple proportions or Dalton's law, and Dalton included a clear description of the law in his "New System of Chemical Philosophy". The law of multiple proportions is one of the basic laws of stoichiometry used to establish the atomic theory.
History of chemistry | John Dalton
The four Merton ‘Calculators’ were not only well versed in the current issues of philosophy during the fourteenth century; they actually initiated new groundbreaking scientific postulations. John of Dumbleton was no exception. Because he concurred with many of the positions held by William Ockham (1288–1348)—especially the idea that is commonly referred to as Ockham’s razor, which states that the most simplistic explanations are ideal—he may have learned how to succinctly formulate his scientific conjectures. Of Dumbleton’s many scientific theories there is one in particular that is worth mentioning here. By making the assumption that bodies are finite, Dumbleton was able to conjecture that contraction or expansion, as in cases of condensation or rarefaction, does not eliminate any parts of a body; rather, a “denumerable number of parts” always exists.
John Dumbleton | Scientific contributions
John Dalton studied and expanded upon this previous work and defended a new idea, later known as the law of multiple proportions: if the same two elements can be combined to form a number of different compounds, then the ratios of the masses of the two elements in their various compounds will be represented by small whole numbers. This is a common pattern in chemical reactions that was observed by Dalton and other chemists at the time. Example 1 — tin oxides: Dalton identified two oxides of tin. One is a grey powder in which for every 100 parts of tin there is 13.5 parts of oxygen.
Atomic theory | John Dalton
John Call Dalton (February 2, 1825 – February 12, 1889) was an American physiologist who became the first full-time professor of physiology in the United States.
John Call Dalton | Introduction
MacNeven's best known contribution to science is his "Exposition of the Atomic Theory" (New York, 1820), which was reprinted in the French "Annales de Chimie". In 1821 he published with emendations an edition of Brande's "Chemistry" (New York, 1829). Some of his purely literary works, his "Rambles through Switzerland" (Dublin, 1803), his "Pieces of Irish History" (New York, 1807), and his numerous political tracts attracted wide attention. He was co-editor for many years of the "New York Medical and Philosophical Journal". See also: Ingham, George R. "Irish Rebel, American Patriot: William James Macneven, 1763-1841", Seattle, WA: Amazon Books, 2015
William James MacNeven | Works
The bronze bust of John Dalton, located along the corridor on the first floor of Burlington House, was created by Miss Levick(also creator of the Humphry Davy bust) and donated to the Chemical Society in 1903 by former president Sir Thomas Edward Thorpe (1845-1925), as also attested by the inscription engraved on the bust's base: "John Dalton presented by T.E. Thorpe CB. L.L.D. F.R.S. past president in commemoration of the centenary of the enunciation of the atomic theory". A copy of his accompanying letter was printed in the "Proceedings of the Chemical Society" in 1903 and read out by president professor William A.
Bust of John Dalton | Introduction
His text showed calculations to determine the relative atomic weights of Lavoisier's different elements based on experimental data pertaining to the relative amounts of different elements in chemical combinations. Dalton argued that elements would combine in the simplest form possible. Water was known to be a combination of hydrogen and oxygen, thus Dalton believed water to be a binary compound containing one hydrogen and one oxygen. Dalton was able to accurately compute the relative quantity of gases in atmospheric air. He used the specific gravity of azotic (nitrogen), oxygenous, carbonic acid (carbon dioxide), and hydrogenous gases as well as aqueous vapor determined by Lavoisier and Davy to determine the proportional weights of each as a percent of a whole volume of atmospheric air.
Chemical revolution | John Dalton
Thus he distrusted, and probably never fully accepted, Gay-Lussac's conclusions as to the combining volumes of gases. He held unconventional views on chlorine. Even after its elementary character had been settled by Davy, he persisted in using the atomic weights he himself had adopted, even when they had been superseded by the more accurate determinations of other chemists.
John Dalton | Experimental approach
Dalton published his first table of relative atomic weights containing six elements (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, sulfur and phosphorus), relative to the weight of an atom of hydrogen conventionally taken as 1. Since these were only relative weights, they do not have a unit of weight attached to them. Dalton provided no indication in this paper how he had arrived at these numbers, but in his laboratory notebook, dated 6 September 1803, is a list in which he set out the relative weights of the atoms of a number of elements, derived from analysis of water, ammonia, carbon dioxide, etc.
John Dalton | Atomic weights
The bronze bust of John Dalton was also created by Ruby Levick and was donated to the Chemical Society in 1903 by its former President Sir Thomas Edward Thorpe, as also attested by the inscription engraved on the bust's base: "John Dalton presented by T.E. Thorpe CB. L.L.D. F.R.S. past President in commemoration of the centenary of the enunciation of the atomic theory". A copy of his accompanying letter was printed in the "Proceedings of the Chemical Society" in 1903 and read out by President William A. Tilden: John Dalton was an English chemist best known for his development of atomic theory.
List of artworks in the collection of the Royal Society of Chemistry | John Dalton bust
The theory that all matter is made of atoms, which are the smallest constituents of matter that cannot be broken down without losing the basic chemical and physical properties of that matter, was provided by John Dalton in 1803, although the question took a hundred years to settle as proven. Dalton also formulated the law of mass relationships. In 1869, Dmitri Mendeleev composed his periodic table of elements on the basis of Dalton's discoveries. The synthesis of urea by Friedrich Wöhler opened a new research field, organic chemistry, and by the end of the 19th century, scientists were able to synthesize hundreds of organic compounds.
History of science | Chemistry
In the early 1780s William assisted in making all the experiments detailed in his uncle Bryan Higgins’ "Experiments and Observations Relating to Acetous Acid". In 1785 William undertook a mineralogical tour through England, also visiting a number of chemical manufacturers. In 1788 he entered Pembroke College, Oxford but did not complete his degree. His next four years after that were spent in London, where he published two editions of his most important work, the "Comparative View of Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Theories" which laid out much of Dalton's atomic theory 19 years earlier.
William Higgins (chemist) | Beginning experiments
In 1800, Dalton became secretary of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, and in the following year he presented an important series of lectures, entitled "Experimental Essays" on the constitution of mixed gases; the pressure of steam and other vapours at different temperatures in a vacuum and in air; on evaporation; and on the thermal expansion of gases. The four essays, presented between 2 and 30 October 1801, were published in the "Memoirs of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester" in 1802. The second essay opens with the remark, After describing experiments to ascertain the pressure of steam at various points between 0 and 100 °C (32 and 212 °F), Dalton concluded from observations of the vapour pressure of six different liquids, that the variation of vapour pressure for all liquids is equivalent, for the same variation of temperature, reckoning from vapour of any given pressure.
John Dalton | Gas laws
In collaboration with Robert Hooke, both scientists tried to solve the problem of planetary orbits and discussed theories with Isaac Newton. In 1704, Edmund Halley became the Savilian Professor of Geometry at Oxford university which then lead to him publishing ‘A Synopsis of the Astronomy of Comets’, which explains his theory of multiple comets being identical. Other discoveries Halley made in later years include his calculation of the distance from the Earth to the sun, which was determined by observing transits of Venus across the disk of the sun. Another astronomer named James Bradley became a student at Oxford university in 1711.
Department of Physics, University of Oxford | Scientific Contributions
In chemistry, Dmitri Mendeleev, following the atomic theory of John Dalton, created the first periodic table of elements. In physics, the experiments, theories and discoveries of Michael Faraday, Andre-Marie Ampere, James Clerk Maxwell, and their contemporaries led to the creation of electromagnetism as a new branch of science. Thermodynamics led to an understanding of heat and the notion of energy was defined. Other highlights include the discoveries unveiling the nature of atomic structure and matter, simultaneously with chemistry – and of new kinds of radiation. In astronomy, the planet Neptune was discovered. In mathematics, the notion of complex numbers finally matured and led to a subsequent analytical theory; they also began the use of hypercomplex numbers.
19th century in science | Introduction
Father Nicholas Joseph Callan, Professor of Natural Philosophy in Maynooth College, is best known for his invention of the induction coil, transformer and he discovered an early method of galvanisation in the 19th century. Other notable Irish physicists include Ernest Walton, winner of the 1951 Nobel Prize in Physics. With Sir John Douglas Cockcroft, he was the first to split the nucleus of the atom by artificial means and made contributions to the development of a new theory of wave equation. William Thomson, or Lord Kelvin, is the person whom the absolute temperature unit, the kelvin, is named after. Sir Joseph Larmor, a physicist and mathematician, made innovations in the understanding of electricity, dynamics, thermodynamics and the electron theory of matter.
Ireland | Science
Before and during their marriage Katherine aided James in his experiments on colour vision and gases. Katherine's observations were valuable to James' scientific work. In his publication in the Philosophical Transactions titled "On the Theory of Compound Colours, and the Relations of the Colours of the Spectrum," James records the observations of two individuals. He reveals himself as the first observer labeled J, but describes the second individual anonymously as "another observer (K)." Lewis Campbell confirms that the observer K was indeed Katherine.
Katherine Clerk Maxwell | Scientific contribution
As an investigator, Dalton was often content with rough and inaccurate instruments, even though better ones were obtainable. Sir Humphry Davy described him as "a very coarse experimenter", who "almost always found the results he required, trusting to his head rather than his hands." On the other hand, historians who have replicated some of his crucial experiments have confirmed Dalton's skill and precision. In the preface to the second part of Volume I of his "New System", he says he had so often been misled by taking for granted the results of others that he determined to write "as little as possible but what I can attest by my own experience", but this independence he carried so far that it sometimes resembled lack of receptivity.
John Dalton | Experimental approach
In 1794, shortly after his arrival in Manchester, Dalton was elected a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, the "Lit & Phil", and a few weeks later he communicated his first paper on "Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours", in which he postulated that shortage in colour perception was caused by discoloration of the liquid medium of the eyeball. As both he and his brother were colour blind, he recognised that the condition must be hereditary. Although Dalton's theory lost credence in his lifetime, the thorough and methodical nature of his research into his visual problem was so broadly recognised that Daltonism became a common term for colour blindness.
John Dalton | Colour blindness
Hamilton's extraordinary investigations connected with the solution of algebraic equations of the fifth degree, and his examination of the results arrived at by N. H. Abel, G. B. Jerrard, and others in their researches on this subject, form another contribution to science. There is next Hamilton's paper on fluctuating functions, a subject which, since the time of Joseph Fourier, has been of immense and ever increasing value in physical applications of mathematics. There is also the extremely ingenious invention of the hodograph. Of his extensive investigations into the solutions (especially by numerical approximation) of certain classes of physical differential equations, only a few items have been published, at intervals, in the "Philosophical Magazine".
William Rowan Hamilton | Other original work
The law was named after scientist Jacques Charles, who formulated the original law in his unpublished work from the 1780s. In two of a series of four essays presented between 2 and 30 October 1801, John Dalton demonstrated by experiment that all the gases and vapours that he studied expanded by the same amount between two fixed points of temperature. The French natural philosopher Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac confirmed the discovery in a presentation to the French National Institute on 31 Jan 1802, although he credited the discovery to unpublished work from the 1780s by Jacques Charles. The basic principles had already been described by Guillaume Amontons and Francis Hauksbee a century earlier.
Charles's law | History
But his original contributions to mathematics were not numerous, and the only formal honour they brought him was election as a corresponding member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. His earliest and most substantial publication was his "Four Propositions", which appeared anonymously in 1769 in an edition that was largely destroyed by fire. In it Dawson identified errors in the calculation that had led Matthew Stewart, the professor of mathematics at Edinburgh, to overestimate the distance between the earth and the sun by more than a quarter. He pursued his argument vigorously when he was attacked by Samuel Horsley in the "Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society"; his reply in the "Gentleman's Magazine" (40, 1770, pp.
John Dawson (surgeon) | Mathematics
When he was 15, Dalton joined his elder brother Jonathan in running a Quaker school in Kendal, Westmorland, about from his home. Around the age of 23 Dalton may have considered studying law or medicine, but his relatives did not encourage him, perhaps because being a Dissenter, he was barred from attending English universities. He acquired much scientific knowledge from informal instruction by John Gough, a blind philosopher who was gifted in the sciences and arts. At the age of 27 he was appointed teacher of mathematics and natural philosophy at the "New College" in Manchester, a dissenting academy (the lineal predecessor, following a number of changes of location, of Harris Manchester College, Oxford).
John Dalton | Early career
Description: This book explained Dalton's theory of atoms and its applications to chemistry. Importance: Topic Creator, Breakthrough, Influence. The book was one of the first to describe a modern atomic theory, a theory that lies at the basis of modern chemistry. It is the first to introduce a table of atomic and molecular weights. Surprisingly, given the period in which the book was written, of the five properties of atoms that Dalton listed, only two have been shown to be incorrect.
List of important publications in chemistry | "A New System of Chemical Philosophy"
His theories are used to explain ion and electron beam acceleration experiments.
Patrick Mora | Scientific contributions
Although Dalton did not get all his atomic weights correct, he was pointing science in the right direction. Sadly, in the early 1800s few scientists accepted the idea that elements had different weights.
Chemistry: A Volatile History | John Dalton's atoms
Two of Dalton's papers have been retracted from the chemistry journal "Inorganica Chimica Acta". The first paper contains, without attribution, both text taken verbatim and spectra copied directly from an English translation of a paper published in "Fiz. Tverd. Tela" (English: Physics of the Solid State). A second paper was retracted from the same journal, 47 years later, due to a disagreement over attribution. The latter scientific work was subsequently published with additional authors, as well as author Sei-Hum Jang moving from a relatively insignificant role (second-to-last) to leading author. Throughout these retraction controversies Dalton's company, Lumera, and wife's family's foundation,The Boand Family Foundation, donated upwards of 20 million dollars to the University of Washington.
Larry Dalton | Controversy
Besides contributions to scientific journals, he published 'A Lecture on Steam Boiler Explosions,' 1845; 'An Introduction to Practical Chemistry' (London, 1848; subsequent editions in 1854, 1858, 1861, 1866, and 1871); and 'A Practical Handbook of Medical Chemistry' (London, 1850, 1852, 1855, and 1862). Later editions of these works were edited by Charles Loudon Bloxam.
John Eddowes Bowman the Younger | Works
Thomas Thomson (12 April 1773 – 2 August 1852) was a Scottish chemist and mineralogist whose writings contributed to the early spread of Dalton's atomic theory. His scientific accomplishments include the invention of the saccharometer and he gave silicon its current name. He served as president of the Philosophical Society of Glasgow. Thomson was the father of the botanist Thomas Thomson, and the uncle and father-in-law of the Medical Officer of Health Robert Thomson.
Thomas Thomson (chemist) | Introduction
Galileo made original contributions to the science of motion through an innovative combination of experiment and mathematics. More typical of science at the time were the qualitative studies of William Gilbert, on magnetism and electricity. Galileo's father, Vincenzo Galilei, a lutenist and music theorist, had performed experiments establishing perhaps the oldest known non-linear relation in physics: for a stretched string, the pitch varies as the square root of the tension. These observations lay within the framework of the Pythagorean tradition of music, well known to instrument makers, which included the fact that subdividing a string by a whole number produces a harmonious scale.
Galileo Galilei | Scientific methods
An interesting characteristic of Bacon's apparently scientific tract was that, although he amassed an overwhelming body of empirical data, he did not make any original discoveries. Indeed, that was never his intention, and such an evaluation of Bacon's legacy may wrongfully lead to an unjust comparison with Newton. Bacon never claimed to have brilliantly revealed new unshakable truths about nature—in fact, he believed that such an endeavour is not the work of single minds but that of whole generations by gradual degrees toward reliable knowledge. In many ways, Bacon's contribution to the advancement of human knowledge lies not in the fruit of his scientific research but in the reinterpretation of the methods of natural philosophy.
Novum Organum | Original contributions
"Having calculated all the lime in oats fed to a hen, found still more in the shells of its eggs. Therefore, there is a creation of matter. In that way, no one knows."
Louis Nicolas Vauquelin | Contributions to chemistry
The anatomy of the brain was primarily drawn by Europeans prior to Dalton's more detailed and precise sketches of the brain. Dalton received an award from the American Medical Association in 1851 for his essay "Corpus Luteum". He was a professor at the University at Buffalo for a brief time, but resigned in 1854. Dalton served as a professor or chairperson at the Vermont medical college and the Long Island College Hospital. John became the president of the College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1884. Dalton served as a surgeon in the national service during the American Civil War from 1861 to 1864.
John Call Dalton | Career
The other oxide is a white powder in which for every 100 parts of tin there is 27 parts of oxygen. 13.5 and 27 form a ratio of 1:2. These oxides are today known as tin(II) oxide (SnO) and tin(IV) oxide (SnO) respectively.
Atomic theory | John Dalton
Dalton was born in Chelmsford, Massachusetts. He studied under French physiologist Claude Bernard in France. Dalton had two understudies: John Green Curtis and William Stewart Halsted. Dalton and Curtis were associated with the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York. Dalton was a professor of physiology at the college; however, it is unclear whether his son was as well. Dalton received his undergraduate and medical degrees from Harvard University.
John Call Dalton | Early life
Hamilton made important contributions to optics and to classical mechanics. His first discovery was in an early paper that he communicated in 1823 to Dr. Brinkley, who presented it under the title of ""Caustics"" in 1824 to the Royal Irish Academy. It was referred as usual to a committee. While their report acknowledged its novelty and value, they recommended further development and simplification before publication. Between 1825 and 1828 the paper grew to an immense size, mostly by the additional details that the committee had suggested. But it also became more intelligible, and the features of the new method were now easily seen.
William Rowan Hamilton | Physics
Solem's research activities have involved experimental, computational, and theoretical physics and mathematics, as well as other areas of science, including magnetism; particle and radiation transport; plasma physics; nuclear physics; nuclear explosive theory; equations-of-state; artificial intelligence and robotics; computational science; x-ray microholography; antiproton science and technology; mathematical physics; astrophysics; exotic methods of spacecraft propulsion; the foundations of quantum mechanics; and laser theory, particularly as it applies to conceptual designs for the gamma-ray laser.
Johndale Solem | Scientific contributions
In chemistry, Dmitri Mendeleev, following the atomic theory of John Dalton, created the first periodic table of elements. In physics, the experiments, theories and discoveries of Michael Faraday, André-Marie Ampère, James Clerk Maxwell, and their contemporaries led to the creation of electromagnetism as a new branch of science. Thermodynamics led to an understanding of heat and the notion of energy was defined. Other highlights include the discoveries unveiling the nature of atomic structure and matter, simultaneously with chemistry – and of new kinds of radiation. In astronomy, the planet Neptune was discovered. In mathematics, the notion of complex numbers finally matured and led to a subsequent analytical theory; they also began the use of hypercomplex numbers.
19th century | Science and technology
Perrin estimated the Avogadro number by a variety of methods, at the turn of the 20th century. He was awarded the 1926 Nobel Prize in Physics, largely for this work.
Dalton (unit) | Jean Perrin
A Swedish chemist and disciple of Dalton, Jöns Jacob Berzelius embarked on a systematic program to try to make accurate and precise quantitative measurements and to ensure the purity of chemicals. Along with Lavoisier, Boyle, and Dalton, Berzelius is known as the father of modern chemistry. In 1828 he compiled a table of relative atomic weights, where oxygen was used as a standard, with its weight set at 100, and which included all of the elements known at the time. This work provided evidence in favor of Dalton's atomic theory - that inorganic chemical compounds are composed of atoms combined in whole number amounts.
History of chemistry | Jöns Jacob Berzelius
He argued for the English translation of historical texts that traced the history of the sciences. He had a hobby as an avid book collector, and he donated much of his collection to the Yale Medical Historical Library. He also added his own work to these collections. He wrote biographies for Harvey Cushing, Benjamin Silliman, Robert Boyle, Girolamo Fracastoro, Richard Lower, John Mayow, Kenelm Digby, and Joseph Priestley. Fulton also discovered early publications of Ambroise Paré, a surgeon who lived in the 16th century.
John Farquhar Fulton | History of science
He developed the cluster expansion method and Mayer-McMillan solution theory.
Joseph Edward Mayer | Scientific contributions
After having received his BSc in physics from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1957, he went to Princeton University, where he completed his PhD in 1964 under the supervision of Bob Dicke. He joined the faculty of the university immediately afterwards. His first major contribution, made in the late 1960s, was to relate the magnetic anomalies of alternating polarity, which occur on the ocean bottom at both sides of a mid-ocean ridge, to seafloor spreading and plate tectonics. From 1971 on he worked on the further development of the plume theory of Tuzo Wilson, which postulates the existence of roughly cylindrical convective upwellings in the Earth's mantle as an explanation of hotspots.
W. Jason Morgan | Life and main scientific contributions
In chemistry, Dmitri Mendeleev, following the atomic theory of John Dalton, created the first periodic table of elements.
19th century in science | Chemistry
Meanwhile, he devoted himself to the preparation of "An Introduction to Natural Philosophy", which was published in 1781 and was at once successful. A translation of Voltaire's "Elements of the Newtonian Philosophy" soon followed, and he then entirely devoted himself to scientific pursuits and philosophical journalism. In 1784 he was proposed by Josiah Wedgwood (the current Chairman) and appointed as secretary to the General Chamber of Manufacturers of Great Britain, and he was also connected with the Society for the Encouragement of Naval Architecture, established in 1791. He gave much attention to the construction of various machines for comb-cutting, file-making, cylinder printing and other uses—he also invented an areometer.
William Nicholson (chemist) | Early life
A second work by Dalton, "Elements of English Grammar" (or "A new system of grammatical instruction: for the use of schools and academies"), was published in 1801.
John Dalton | Meteorology
Similar to these views, in 1803 John Dalton took the atomic weight of hydrogen, the lightest element, as unity, and determined, for example, that the ratio for nitrous anhydride was 2 to 3 which gives the formula NO. Dalton incorrectly imagined that atoms "hooked" together to form molecules. Later, in 1808, Dalton published his famous diagram of combined "atoms": Amedeo Avogadro created the word "molecule". His 1811 paper "Essay on Determining the Relative Masses of the Elementary Molecules of Bodies", he essentially states, i.e. according to Partington's "A Short History of Chemistry", that: Note that this quote is not a literal translation.
History of molecular theory | 19th century
The idea of the direct correlation of the charge of the atom nucleus and the periodic table was contained in his paper published in "Nature" on July 20, 1911, just one month after Rutherford published the results of his experiments that showed the existence of a small charged nucleus in an atom (see Rutherford model). However, Rutherford's original paper noted only that the charge on the nucleus was large, on the order of about half of the atomic weight of the atom, in whole number units of hydrogen mass. Rutherford on this basis made the tentative suggestion that atomic nuclei are composed of numbers of helium nuclei, each with a charge corresponding to half of its atomic weight.
Antonius van den Broek | Major contribution to science
His answers led to other questions, and this scientific correspondence continued until 1740.
Dominique Parrenin | Works
James Tytler, chemist; a man who, though his conduct has been marked by almost perpetual imprudence, possesses no common share of science and genius." Tytler's contributions stop in fact at the letter M. Tytler's very long article in the second edition on Medicine, "was revised and improved for the present by Andrew Duncan, M.D., fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and Professor of the Institutes of Physic in the University." He also states that Motion was written by himself and Tytler.
Encyclopædia Britannica Third Edition | Content and contributors
The particle theory of light was also proposed by Ibn al-Haytham, Ibn Sina, Gassendi, and Newton. Those early ideas were founded through abstract, philosophical reasoning rather than experimentation and empirical observation and represented only one line of thought among many. In contrast, certain ideas of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (see "Monadology") contradict to almost everything known in modern physics. In the 19th century, John Dalton, through his work on stoichiometry, concluded that each chemical element was composed of a single, unique type of particle. Dalton and his contemporaries believed those were the fundamental particles of nature and thus named them atoms, after the Greek word "atomos", meaning "indivisible" or "uncut".
History of subatomic physics | Early development
Prof Richard Feynman contributed in a 1955 paper to the question of "What is the Value of Science".
The Value of Science | Other contributions
James Joule worked on thermodynamics and is often credited with the discovery of the principle of conservation of energy. Naturalist Charles Darwin wrote "On the Origin of Species" and discovered the principle of evolution by natural selection. James Hutton, founder of modern geology, worked on the age of the Earth (deep time) which forms a key element of Darwin's theory. Other important geologists include Charles Lyell, author of "Principles of Geology", who also coined the term Pleistocene, and Adam Sedgwick, who proposed (and coined) the name of the Cambrian Period. William Thomson (Baron Kelvin) drew important conclusions in the field of thermodynamics and invented the Kelvin scale of absolute zero.
Culture of the United Kingdom | Science and technology
Scientists that have conducted research at Oxford have made contributions to science including developments in technology and applications in the medical fields. An astronomer named Edmund Halley was a young astronomer who made discoveries in relation to the stars. The young astronomer sailed to an island named St. Helena to make observations of stars and broaden his star catalogue. Edmund became the first person to make telescopic observations of the stars in the southern hemisphere and had discovered a star cluster in the constellation of Centaurus during the 1690s. Halley further developed his research by creating the first maps of the geomagnetic field and the prevailing winds, which is also known as the first meteorological chart.
Department of Physics, University of Oxford | Scientific Contributions
Dunn also contributed many papers for the journal of the Royal Institute of Chemistry, and a number of other scientific journals.
John Thomas Dunn (chemist) | Publications
Pople's major scientific contributions were in four different areas:
John Pople | Research
Several important scientific developments of the 19th and 20th centuries were made here, mainly at the Old Cavendish Laboratory, including the discoveries of the electron by J. J. Thomson (1897) and the neutron by Chadwick (1932), splitting the atom by Cockcroft and Walton (1932), mechanism of nervous conduction by Hodgkin and Huxley (1930s–40s), and DNA structure by Watson and Crick (1953).
New Museums Site | Introduction
Hamilton originally matured his ideas before putting pen to paper. The discoveries, papers, and treatises previously mentioned might well have formed the whole work of a long and laborious life. But not to speak of his enormous collection of books, full to overflowing with new and original matter, which have been handed over to Trinity College, Dublin, the previous mentioned works barely form the greater portion of what Hamilton has published. Hamilton developed the variational principle, which was reformulated later by Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi. He also introduced the icosian game or "Hamilton's puzzle" which can be solved using the concept of a Hamiltonian path.
William Rowan Hamilton | Other original work
Dalton never married and had only a few close friends. As a Quaker, he lived a modest and unassuming personal life. For the 26 years prior to his death, Dalton lived in a room in the home of the Rev W. Johns, a published botanist, and his wife, in George Street, Manchester. Dalton and Johns died in the same year (1844). Dalton's daily round of laboratory work and tutoring in Manchester was broken only by annual excursions to the Lake District and occasional visits to London. In 1822 he paid a short visit to Paris, where he met many distinguished resident men of science.
John Dalton | Personal life
King has written that through Dalton, Gough exerted an indirect influence years later on James Joule, who undertook his own investigations into rubber, elasticity, and energy changes, and specifically referred to Gough's earlier studies. The effect eventually became known as the Gough–Joule effect. Gough's most substantive enquiry was "An investigation of the method whereby men judge by the ear of the position of sonorous bodies relative to their own persons", which appeared in 1802 during an ongoing controversy with another former Quaker, the noted natural philosopher Thomas Young, over the nature of compound sounds.
John Gough (natural philosopher) | Career
Scientists had recently discovered that when elements combine to form compounds, they always do so in the same proportions, by weight. John Dalton thought that for this to happen, each element had to be made of its own unique building blocks, which he called atoms. Dalton suggested that everything in the universe was made of atoms, and that there are as many kinds of atoms as there are elements, each one with its own signature weight. Based on these ideas, working completely alone, Dalton attempted to impose some order on the elements by drawing up a list, where each element was represented by an alchemical-looking symbol, ordered by atomic weight.
Chemistry: A Volatile History | John Dalton's atoms
His first chemistry research was published in 1735 and in 1736 he became an assistant chemist at the Academie Royale des Sciences, succeeding Charles Marie de la Condamine (1701-1774). He rose to the position of chief chemist in 1743 after the death of Louis Lemery. Hellot's contributions to chemistry include studies on dyeing and mordants for wool. He also demonstrated that colors in precious minerals were due to gaseous additives at the time of formation. Hellot studied the formulation and assaying of metals and their alloys and techniques for refining metal. In 1763 he was part of committee to examine fire hazards in a coalmine in Briancon.
Jean Hellot | Introduction
The flaw in Dalton's theory was corrected in principle in 1811 by Amedeo Avogadro. Avogadro had proposed that equal volumes of any two gases, at equal temperature and pressure, contain equal numbers of molecules (in other words, the mass of a gas's particles does not affect the volume that it occupies). Avogadro's law allowed him to deduce the diatomic nature of numerous gases by studying the volumes at which they reacted. For instance: since two liters of hydrogen will react with just one liter of oxygen to produce two liters of water vapor (at constant pressure and temperature), it meant a single oxygen molecule splits in two in order to form two particles of water.
Atomic theory | Avogadro
Breintnall worked with Franklin to verify the results of an experiment designed to ascertain the relationship between color and energy absorption from the sun.
Joseph Breintnall | Nature Printing and Other Contributions to the Study of Natural History
Bleuler's most notable contribution was the introduction of Gupta–Bleuler formalism for the quantization of the electromagnetic field, which he developed independently with Suraj N. Gupta. This was an important work on quantum electrodynamics. Bleuler also made contributions to nuclear and particle physics. He also wrote about the work of other famous scientists, so on Wolfgang Pauli and Rolf Nevanlinna.
Konrad Bleuler | Scientific works
His work, along with that of pioneers such as Jacques Boucher de Crèvecœur de Perthes, produced reasoned argument against the traditional Biblical chronology. Pengelly, on various occasions exchanged letters with Charles Darwin amongst others describing results gathered. These letters are a matter of record. Pengelly's discoveries led him to conclude (amongst others like John Evans) that the traditional Biblical chronology did not appear to match their research, a case made forcefully by them in 1859.
William Pengelly | Contributions to science
Another notable contributor to this development was the German researcher Hermann von Helmholtz, who gave an essentially Newtonian, that is, mechanical, account. William Thomson (later Lord Kelvin) received the works of Joule and Helmholtz positively, embracing them as providing support for the emerging "science of energy." In the late 1840s to the 1850s, Kelvin, his friend William John Macquorn Rankine, and the German Rudolf Clausius published a steady stream of papers concerning heat engines and an absolute temperature scale. Indeed, the commercial value of new science had already become apparent by this time; some businessmen were quite willing to offer generous financial support for researchers.
Victorian era | Thermodynamics, heat engines, and refrigerators
He also co-wrote a textbook "Thermodynamics for Chemical Engineers" (1975). Other scientific topics he wrote about include phase transitions, critical phenomena, computer simulations of interfaces, glaciers, and information theory. In addition to his technical works, Rowlinson wrote about the history of science. His works on this topic began with the Nature paper "The Legacy of van der Waals" in 1973. He followed it up with further works on Johannes Diderik van der Waals, including a 1988 translation of van der Waals' doctoral thesis, and a 1996 biography of the Dutch physicist. His colleague Benjamin Widom praised the translation as "no less[...] than a masterwork" and the accompanying introduction "brilliant both as science and as history".
John Shipley Rowlinson | Work
Careful study of the actual numerical values of these proportions led Dalton to propose his law of multiple proportions. This was an important step toward the atomic theory that he would propose later that year, and it laid the basis for chemical formulas for compounds.
Law of multiple proportions | Introduction
Near the end of the 18th century, two laws about chemical reactions emerged without referring to the notion of an atomic theory. The first was the law of conservation of mass, closely associated with the work of Antoine Lavoisier, which states that the total mass in a chemical reaction remains constant (that is, the reactants have the same mass as the products). The second was the law of definite proportions. First established by the French chemist Joseph Proust in 1797 this law states that if a compound is broken down into its constituent chemical elements, then the masses of the constituents will always have the same proportions by weight, regardless of the quantity or source of the original substance.
Atomic theory | John Dalton
In 1785 he published a series of memoirs arguing against Isaac Newton's theory that light was transmitted by "corpuscles", citing both natural observations and Scripture. Bowdoin maintained a lifelong interest in the sciences. In 1780 he was one of the founders of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as its first president until his death and left the society his library. Bowdoin published not only scientific papers, but poetry in both English and Latin. He was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Edinburgh and made a fellow of Harvard. His 1788 election to the Royal Society of London was the first such honor bestowed on an American after independence.
James Bowdoin | Scientific and other pursuits
In 1751 he was a recipient of the Copley Medal "On account of his communicating to the Society, and exhibiting before them, his curious method of making Artificial Magnets without the use of Natural ones." He was the first in England to verify Benjamin Franklin's hypothesis of the identity of lightning and electricity, and he made several important electrical discoveries. In 1762 and 1764 he published experiments in refutation of the decision of the Florentine Academy, at that time generally accepted, that water is incompressible. In 1768 he described the preparation, by calcining oyster-shell with sulphur, of the phosphorescent material known as Canton's phosphorus.
John Canton | Introduction
Although Brewster's own discoveries were important, they were not his only service to science. He began writing in 1799 as a regular contributor to the "Edinburgh Magazine", of which he acted as editor at the age of twenty. In 1807, he undertook the editorship of the newly projected "Edinburgh Encyclopædia", of which the first part appeared in 1808, and the last not until 1830. The work was strongest in the scientific department, and many of its most valuable articles were from the pen of the editor. At a later period he was one of the leading contributors to the "Encyclopædia Britannica" (seventh and eighth editions) writing, among others, the articles on electricity, hydrodynamics, magnetism, microscope, optics, stereoscope, and voltaic electricity.
David Brewster | Other work
John Wallis of Kent, introduced the symbol for infinity, and the standard notation for powers of numbers in 1656. Thomas Bayes was an important statistician from Tunbridge Wells; his theorem (of probability theory) is used for spam filters and Google's search. Sir David N. Payne at the University of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre invented the erbium-doped fibre amplifier, a type of optical amplifier, in the mid-1980s, which became essential for the internet. Henry Moseley at Oxford in 1913 discovered his Moseley's law of X-ray spectra of chemical elements that enabled him to be the first to assign the correct atomic number to elements in periodic table; he did not receive any Nobel Prize as it is not awarded posthumously, and he was killed in 1915 at Gallipoli with the Royal Engineers.
South East England | Scientific heritage
Joule could not resist finding antecedents of his views in Francis Bacon, Sir Isaac Newton, John Locke, Benjamin Thompson (Count Rumford) and Sir Humphry Davy. Though such views are justified, Joule went on to estimate a value for the mechanical equivalent of heat of 1034 foot-pound from Rumford's publications. Some modern writers have criticised this approach on the grounds that Rumford's experiments in no way represented systematic quantitative measurements. In one of his personal notes, Joule contends that Mayer's measurement was no more accurate than Rumford's, perhaps in the hope that Mayer had not anticipated his own work.
James Prescott Joule | Kinetic theory
He has written about symmetries, integrable nonlinear PDEs, Painleve equations and random matrices, models for leukemia and protein folding, electro-magneto-enchephalography, nuclear imaging, and relativistic gravity. Also, he has introduced a new method for solving boundary value problems known as the Fokas method. I. M. Gelfand, a mathematician, who has also written about biology, in the citation for the Aristeion prize, wrote "Fokas is now a very rare example of a scientist in the style of the Renaissance".
Athanassios S. Fokas | Research contributions
He contributed about twenty seven papers to various scientific societies in London. He published "Thesaurus Devonico-Carboniferus" but died shortly before completing "Thesaurus Permianus". In 1874, he was awarded the Murchison Medal. In 1876, he endowed the Bigsby Medal.
John Jeremiah Bigsby | Introduction