19th Century

Born: Eaglesfield (England), 1766 
Died: Manchester (England), 1844

Dalton left school at the age of eleven and in 1778 he started teaching at a Quaker school. Dalton's scientific research started with metereology. In 1794 he was the first to describe colour blindness. Dalton also studied the composition of air and gases and in 1801 he promulgated the law of partial pressures. Two years later he enunciated the law of multiple proportions. Dalton first advanced atomic notions and in 1808 he published the "New System of Chemical Philosophy". He was also the first to prepare a table of atomic weights. Nowadays one name used for the measure of atomic weights is the dalton.