City Philosophical Society

Transmutation of Copper into Lithium.—The transmutation of the baser metals into gold was one of the chief aims of the alchemists. Although their labours proved fruitless as regards their immediate object, they laid the foundation of that scientific chemistry to which the modem industrial world owes a deep debt of obligation. In 1818 Faraday contemplated as a possibility the transmutation of the metals, for he said in a lecture delivered before the City Philosophical Society To decompose the metals, to re-form them, and to realize the once absurd notion of transmutation—these are the problems now given to the chemist for solution. 6... 

Faraday s experience grew. He studied chlorine and its reactions and isolated the first two compounds of carbon and chlorine. While serving as an expert witness in a court case, he investigated the ignition point of heated oil vapor, which led to the discovery of benzene. When he was 30 years old he married Sarah Barnard, the sister of one of his friends at the City Philosophical Society when he was about 40 he began investigating connections between electricity and chemistry— the work that would be his greatest claim to chemical fame. 

John Dalton (1766-1844) lived and worked most of his life in Manchester, and he was a mainstay of that city s Literary and Philosophical Society. He had a life-long interest in the earth s atmosphere. Indeed, it was this interest that led him to study gases, out of which study grew his atomic hypothesis (2). His experiments on gases also led to a result now known as Dalton s law of partial pressures (5). Dalton s name is also linked to color blindness, sometimes called daltonism, a condition he described from firsthand experience. 

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