John Dalton

Chemist John Dalton was born September 6, 1766, in

Eaglesfield, England. During his early career, he
identified the hereditary nature of red-green color
blindness. In 1803 he revealed the concept of Daltons
Law of Partial Pressures. Also in the 1800s, he was the
first scientist to explain the behavior of atoms in terms of the measurement of weight. Dalton
died July 26, 1844 in Manchester, England.

Early Life and Career

British chemist John Dalton was born in Eaglesfield, England, on September 6, 1766, to a Quaker family.
He had two surviving siblings. Both he and his brother were born color-blind. Dalton's father earned a
modest income as a handloom weaver. As a child, Dalton longed for a formal education, but his family
was very poor. It was clear that he would need to help out with the family finances from a young age.
After attending a Quaker school in his village in Cumberland, when Dalton was just 12 years old he
started teaching there. When he was 14, he spent a year working as a farmhand, but decided to return
to teachingthis time as an assistant at a Quaker boarding school in Kendal. Within four years, the shy
young man was made principal of the school. He remained there until 1793, at which time he became a
math and philosophy tutor at the New College in Manchester.
While at New College, Dalton joined the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. Membership
granted Dalton access to laboratory facilities. For one of his first research projects, Dalton pursued his
avid interest in meteorology. He started keeping daily logs of the weather, paying special attention to
details such as wind velocity and barometric pressurea habit Dalton would continue all of his life. His
research findings on atmospheric pressure were published in his first book, Meteorological Findings, the
year he arrived in Manchester.

Dalton's Law
Dalton's interest in atmospheric pressures eventually led him to a closer examination of gases. While
studying the nature and chemical makeup of air in the early 1800s, Dalton learned that it was not a
chemical solvent, as other scientists had believed. Instead it was a mechanical system composed of
small individual particles that used pressure applied by each gas independently.
#1 He made several remarkable meteorological observations in his first published work
ohn Dalton
Daltons first major achievements were in meteorology, the scientific study of
atmosphere. In 1793, Meteorological Observations and Essays became his first
published work. It asserted for the first time that water vapour existed
independently in air and didnt combine chemically with other atmospheric gases.
It also contained his study of aurora borealis which detected the magnetic
relation of the phenomenon and concluded its light to be of purely electrical
origin. Dalton made important contributions to meteorology throughout his scientific career
and was called theFather of Meteorology by John Frederic Daniell.

#2 John Dalton published the first ever paper on colour blindness

John Dalton was colour blind and so was his elder brother Jonathan Dalton. In his 1794 paper
Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours Dalton described the defect he had
discovered in his own and his brothers vision. This paper was the first publication on colour
blindness. Though Dalton correctly recognized that the deficiency was hereditary, his theory
regarding it was incorrect. Still colour blindness is sometimes referred to as Daltonism as he
was the first scientist to thoroughly investigate the defect.

#3 John Dalton did pioneering work in hydrologyMeteorological Observations and Essays

The first published work of John Dalton
Daltons 1799 paper proposed after research and estimated calculations that the quantity of
rain and dew are equal to the quantity of water carried off by evaporation and by the rivers. It
also contained the earliest definition of the dew-point and settled for all practically purposes
the controversy over the origin of springs by his conclusion that they are fed by rain. This paper
was an important step in the development of quantitative hydrological cycles. Due to John
Daltons contribution, the Dalton Medal is given to hydrologists by the European Geophysical
Society for distinguished research in the field.
Dmitri Mendeleev,
Russian in full Dmitry Ivanovich
Mendeleyev (born January 27 (February 8, New Style),
1834, Tobolsk, Siberia, Russian Empiredied January 20
(February 2), 1907, St. Petersburg, Russia), Russian
chemist who developed the periodic classification of the
elements. Mendeleev found that, when all the
known chemical elements were arranged in order of increasing atomic weight, the resulting
table displayed a recurring pattern, or periodicity, of properties within groups of elements. In
his version of the periodic table of 1871, he left gaps in places where he believed unknown
elements would find their place. He even predicted the likely properties of three of the
potential elements. The subsequent proof of many of his predictions within his lifetime brought
fame to Mendeleev as the founder of the periodic law.

Mendeleev was born in the small Siberian town of Tobolsk as the last of 14 surviving children
(or 13, depending on the source) of Ivan Pavlovich Mendeleev, a teacher at the local
gymnasium, and Mariya Dmitriyevna Kornileva. Dmitris father became blind in the year of
Dmitris birth and died in 1847. To support the family, his mother turned to operating a small
glass factory owned by her family in a nearby town. The factory burned down in December
1848, and Dmitris mother took him to St. Petersburg, where he enrolled in the
Main Pedagogical Institute. His mother died soon after, and Mendeleev graduated in 1855. He
got his first teaching position at Simferopol in Crimea. He stayed there only two months and,
after a short time at the lyceum of Odessa, decided to go back to St. Petersburg to continue his
education. He received a masters degree in 1856 and began to conduct research in
organic chemistry. Financed by a government fellowship, he went to study abroad for two years
at the University of Heidelberg. Instead of working closely with the prominent chemists of the
university, including Robert Bunsen, Emil Erlenmeyer, and August Kekul, he set up a laboratory
in his own apartment. In September 1860 he attended the International Chemistry Congress
in Karlsruhe, convened to discuss such crucial issues as atomic weights, chemical symbols,
and chemical formulas. There he met and established contacts with many of Europes leading
chemists. In later years Mendeleev would especially remember a paper circulated by the Italian
chemist Stanislao Cannizzaro that clarified the notion of atomic weights.