‘In praise of famous men’—the John Dalton bicentenary celebrations, 1966

Abstract

SIR HUMPHRY DAVY once tartly observed that John Dalton ‘was a very disinterested man, and had no ambition beyond that of being thought a great philosopher’. Whether or not the comment was deserved, the attention paid to Dalton in 1966, the bicentenary year of his birth, amply confirms that the ambition was fulfilled. John Dalton has a variety of claims to scientific fame. As the lectures, meetings, discussions, articles and books of the past year have shown, a number of modern scientific disciplines would like to claim him as ‘really’ their own. For a start, he was the first accurately to describe colour-blindness or ‘Daltonism’, a defect under which he himself laboured. Then again, he was a pioneer meteorologist, as his early Meteorological observations and essays testify, and as his auroral theories and his unbroken records of Manchester weather through more than half a century confirm. More than this, his was a name to be reckoned with when the physics of gases were under discussion. Our continued reference to ‘Dalton’s’ law of partial pressures betrays this aspect of his fame.