Читать книгу The Fontana History of Chemistry - William Brock J. - Страница 32

John Dalton (1766–1844) was born at Eaglesfield in Cumbria, the son of a weaver, and, like most contemporary members of the Society of Friends, was a man of some learning. The highly efficient Quaker network of schooling and informal education ensured that Dalton received a good schooling; he himself began to teach village schoolchildren when he reached the age of twelve. In his teens he mastered sufficient geometry to be able to study Newton’s Principia. At the age of fifteen, Dalton and his brother moved to Kendall, in the English Lake District, where they acquired their own school, which offered Greek, Latin, French and mathematics. At Kendall, Dalton was befriended by the blind Quaker scholar, John Gough, who further encouraged Dalton’s mathematical abilities and knowledge of Newtonian natural philosophy, including the work of Boyle and Boerhaave. The constant stimulation of rapidly changing weather conditions among the mountains and lakes of Westmorland and Cumberland (present-day Cumbria) interested him in meteorology. The records he kept over a five-year period were published in Meteorological Essays in 1793. In the same year, on Gough’s recommendation, Dalton moved to Manchester as tutor in mathematics and natural philosophy at New College, a Dissenting academy that had begun its distinguished life elsewhere as the Warrington Academy. Here Priestley had taught between 1761 and 1767.

Although Manchester New College moved to York in 1803, Dalton, finding Manchester congenial, spent the remainder of his life there as a private teacher and industrial consultant. Not only was there an abundance of paid work in Manchester for private tutors because of a rising industrial middle class (Dalton’s most famous pupil was a brewer’s son, the physicist James Prescott Joule), but the presence of the Literary and Philosophical Society, whose Secretary Dalton became in 1800 and President from 1817 until his death, proved a congenial venue for the presentation and articulation of his scientific work. Dalton read his first scientific paper, on self-diagnosed colour blindness (long after known as Daltonism) to the Society in 1794. He went on reading papers and reports to the Society up to his death. From about 1815 onwards, however, Dalton failed more and more to keep pace with the chemical literature. In 1839 he suffered the ignominy of having a paper of his on phosphates and arsenates rejected by the Royal Society on the grounds that a superior account of these salts had already been published by Thomas Graham.

Despite such failings, Dalton retained the respect of the chemical and scientific communities. Together with two other Dissenters from Anglicanism, Michael Faraday and Robert Brown, the botanist, and despite the angry opposition of Oxford High Churchmen, Dalton was awarded an honorary degree by Oxford University in 1832. A year later the government awarded him a Civil List pension for life, and in 1834 Edinburgh University gave him another honorary degree. His final accolade was a public funeral in Manchester. Even if we grant that some of these honours served a secondary purpose of drawing attention to scientists and their contribution to culture in Victorian Britain, we are bound to ask: What did Dalton do to merit such public honours?