John Dalton: The Man who Ushered in Atomic Research

John Dal­ton was born in Eagles­field, Eng­land on Sep­tem­ber 6, 1766. His par­ents raised him as a Quak­er with earnest val­ues: to live one’s life, not on a set of beliefs or utter­ances of God, but rather to exist as a tes­ti­mo­ny to the world. His fam­i­ly taught him that an individual’s exis­tence should give mean­ing to hard work, humil­i­ty, altru­ism, kind­ness, sim­plic­i­ty, com­mu­ni­ty, tol­er­ance and equal­i­ty. Though his fam­i­ly was extreme­ly fru­gal, he was for­tu­nate to receive an edu­ca­tion from his father, who was a weaver, and from a fel­low Quak­er, John Fletch­er, who ran a pri­vate school in a vil­lage near­by. Through this for­tune, Dal­ton became a pre­co­cious young man with an insa­tiable appetite for knowl­edge who, by the time he was 12-years-old, taught at a local school to help sup­port his fam­i­ly.

At 15, Dal­ton moved to Kendal to join his broth­er in teach­ing at a Quak­er school. He was acute and eager to learn. How­ev­er, Dal­ton was a Quak­er, and as a Quak­er, he was a dis­senter and was not encour­aged to pur­sue high­er edu­ca­tion: soci­ety barred him from attend­ing Eng­lish uni­ver­si­ties. Nonethe­less, his curi­ous nature inspired him to seek acad­e­mia, regard­less of the lim­its that soci­ety imposed on him. Thus, to con­tin­ue to feed his won­der, he received infor­mal instruc­tion from John Gough, a…