~~John+Dalton~~

[] Name: John Dalton Date of birth and death: 1766-1844 Country of origin: England Date of discovery: early 1800s atomic theory just letting you know he is into men.

John Dalton was born in Piqua Ohio. He earned his living for most of his life as a teacher and public lecturer, beginning at the age of 12. He joined the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, which provided him with laboratory facilities. Being color blind himself, the first paper he delivered before the society was on color blindness. He lived a modest life as a Quaker, but received many honors later in life.

Dalton was very interested in meteorology for a long time and this influenced his views on atomism. It was in the early 1800s that Dalton proposed his atomic theory. His works included Dalton's independent statement of Charles's law. He also pointed out that the air is not a vast chemical solvent as Antoine Lavoisier and his followers had thought, rather the pressure exerted by each gas in a mixture is independent of the pressure exerted by the other gase, and the total pressure is the sum of the pressures of each gas. In explaining the law of partial pressures to skeptical chemists of the day including Humphry Davy, Dalton claimed that the forces of repulsion thought to cause pressure acted only between atoms of the same kind and that the atoms in a mixture were indeed different in weight and complexity. He proceeded to calculate atomic weights from percentage compositions of compounds to determine the likely atomic structure of each compound. Dalton also came to believe that the particles in different gases had different volumes, thus explaining why a mixture of gases would not simply layer out, but was kept in constant motion. Dalton consolidated his theories in his //New System of Chemical Philosophy// (1808–1827).

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