Dalton, John Philosophical Society

John Dalton, On the Absorption of Gases by Water and Other Liquids, Memoirs of the Manchester Literary Philosophical Society 6 (1805) 271-287. 

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. 

Another publication from Manchester on this question came from John Sharpe, a friend of John Dalton, a solicitor and member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, who read a paper to that body in 1806 titled An Account of Some Experiments to Ascertain whether the Force of Steam be in Proportion to the Generating Heat . Although the paper was not published until 1813, it is more than likely that Watt knew of it earlier than that through his Manchester connections.48... 

John Dalton (1766-1844) founded the experiment-based atomic theory. In 1798 he was elected to be a Member of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Manchester, England. There, he read on Oct. 21, 1803 the communication on the Chemical Atomic Theory. ... 

James, the second surviving child, had an elder and a younger brother and two younger sisters, one of whom died in childhood. He was too delicate for school, so he had private tutors instead. When he was fourteen he and his elder brother, Benjamin, were sent to learn mathe-matics and science under John Dalton, the doyen of Manchester science. The Joule boys studied for three years under John Dalton at the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, after which they assisted their father in the brewery. I doubt if the work was onerous, for young Joule was able to carry out his early scientific work there before his father built him a laboratory at home. 

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