In Our Time - John Dalton

Episode Date: October 27, 2016

The scientist John Dalton was born in North England in 1766. Although he came from a relatively poor Quaker family, he managed to become one of the most celebrated scientists of his age. Through his work, he helped to establish Manchester as a place where not only products were made but ideas were born. His reputation during his lifetime was so high that unusually a statue was erected to him before he died. Among his interests were meteorology, gasses and colour blindness. However, he is most remembered today for his pioneering thinking in the field of atomic theory. With: Jim Bennett Former Director of the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Oxford and Keeper Emeritus at the Science MuseumAileen Fyfe Reader in British History at the University of St AndrewsJames Sumner Lecturer in the History of Technology at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of ManchesterProducer: Victoria Brignell.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for news about In Our Time, and for recommendations about our archive, please follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the programmes. Hello, in 1766, John Dalton was born in Cumberland. He was the son of a weaver, and for a time, worked as an agricultural labourer. But despite his relatively humble social background and little formal schooling, he became one of the leading scientists of his day. At about Quaker, his scientific interests were wide-ranging. He investigated meteorology, colour blindness and the height of hills in the Lake District. Through his public lectures and experiments, he brought his research and of other scientists to a large audience here and in Europe. He's perhaps most noted, though, for his development of an early version of atomic theory. When he died in 1844, an estimated 40,000 people in Manchester filed past his coffin to pay their respects.

With me to discuss the life and career of John Dalton are Jim Bennett, former director of the Museum of the History of Science at the University of Oxford and Keeper Emeritus at the Science Museum, Aileen Fife, reader in British history at the University of St Andrews, and James Sumner, lecturer in the history of technology at the centre for the history of science, technology and medicine at the University of Manchester. Jim Bennett, what do we know about John Dalton's family background in the early years?

Well, it was a modest background, certainly. As you said, he was born in Eaglesfield, grew up in Eaglesfield, a little village in Cumberland, and very much in a Quaker family and in a Quaker context. It's interesting to think about Dalton's origins because Dalton grew up to be a man of very steady habits and very settled ways of being and ways of living. And many of these settled habits began in this very early life.

And Quakerism is something that carries right through his life. He goes to a Quaker school in a nearby village and that school folds when he's about 12, 12 or 13, and he starts his own school in Eaglesfield, which is an extraordinary thing to do at that age. And again, teaching is something that carries all the way through Dalton's career. The school he establishes isn't very successful,

he does a bit of agricultural labouring, but then he gets the opportunity to take on an assistant mastership in a school in Kendall. And again, that school, the headmaster leaves and he takes it over with his brother and he's in Kendall for 12 years and while he's in both Eaglesfield and in Kendall he takes up meteorology and he becomes interested in the natural

well there's a lot of weather around I suppose so it's a natural thing to be interested in and he takes up a strong interest in the natural world and again meteorology continues right through his career the the record that he keeps of the weather daily continues literally to his dying day Every day he pops his head out of the window and takes measurements. Well, certainly when he's at home, he does that every day, and the day he dies, he does. But he's taken up by, Kendall gives him a big education.

Can you just talk about Goff and the library that he had access to him in Campbell? Yes, well, indeed, he had access to a library, even in Eaglesfield, because Eliu Robinson is, again a local Quaker mathematician, not quite as well known as Goff in Kendall. But there's a strong, cultural. learning within the Quaker movement. And as well as formal schools, a young lad like Dalton could be encouraged

by people with libraries and people of learning, and both there and in Eagles in Kendall. He has, he benefits from that. And we're talking about individual tuition. These fellow Quakers took him up and saw he was a bright boy and enjoyed teaching him or did demand teaching from there. It's a sort of fatherliness about it. he's looked after, he's encouraged.

There is individual teaching, certainly. In Goff's case, Goff's blind. So young Dalton is able to help him in various ways in his studies. So there's a mutual helpfulness there. But certainly, yes, it's at an individual basis. There is some teaching of natural philosophy, experimental natural philosophy, even in the school that Dalton runs in Kendall. They have an air pump and they have a telescope

and they have books and natural philosophy. So while teaching, Dalton is also learning. And I think that's a register that continues through his work because he tends to simplify things and systematize them and so on in the manner of a schoolteacher. And that's something that characterizes, I think, the way he thinks about theories of the natural world. We hear that Goff, the blind naturalist and philosopher,

taught him French and Latin. Yes. You want to verify that. Yes. That's right, it is extraordinary, but also mathematics. And indeed, I think that the natural sciences begin to dominate with Dalton quite quickly because he's able to be his own man quite early, even before he's a very learned or widely read scientist,

he's doing his own work. He's making his own instruments. He's making his own recordings. And he seems to have the confidence to start theorizing, or at least systematizing his observations, while he's learning. It isn't that he comes out as a fully-flaged scientist in the way we think, and then starts research. It's all bound up in Dalton's style of life of learning and researching, teaching and being part of this learned community.

Where does this spark come from, do you think? I mean, he... There are courses of lectures. There are accessible textbooks. There's a culture of self-learning in natural philosophy. And the other thing to say is that it's almost an advantage that Dalton doesn't have a formal education. The formal education that would have been available to him in other social circumstances wouldn't have had much experimental natural philosophy as part of it. And the kind of schooling that he has, or the schooling that he's involved in delivering as well as receiving, has more science than you would expect in more traditional schools.

And there's also his religion, Quakerism, which you've mentioned, but Alien, can we talk more about that? Because it was very, very important. He was an active Quaker. He was a Quaker all his life. Dress differently. He dressed as a Quaker dress. He veed and vowed everybody and so on. Can you develop the Quaker idea? Yeah, I mean, it's really striking that he was a Quaker through his life because there are plenty of other examples of men of science who were born as Quakers, but quite a number of them then left the Quaker community later on, as did many other ambitious and successful people of Quaker birthright. Because remember, the Quakers are a kind of community where they're very clear lines about who's in the community and who's out of the community, and you have to remain in good standing with your local meeting house. and when you move from one location to another,

you have to get a certificate to move you from one meeting house to another meeting house. So it's relatively easy to leave a meeting by not still being in good standing. Did they still, at that time, at his time, have a reputation for being disturbing? And a lot of them mean sent to jail after the civil war and so. Was that the reputation? Was that the reputation of pacifists, men of quietude and achievement? What was going on? Yeah, I mean, in the late 17th century, the early 18th century, you're right.

Quakers suffered quite a lot of persecution. and imprisonment and confiscation of property and they were, this is part of how the Quaker community sees itself as a community set apart. But on the other hand, by the time you get into the later 18th century, they're no longer suffering that sort of persecution.

They now have a reputation for being non-conformist, certainly, for not being part of the Anglican establishment, but for respectability. They're very much aligned with the rising middle classes that are emerging in, particularly in northern England and Scotland, in that late 18th century period. So being a Quaker means being outside of the establishment,

but certainly being part of a respectable and respected community. As Jim has indicated, it was an advantage. The Quakers could not go to universities because they weren't Church of England, and the big universities, well, the only universities, Oxford and Cambridge. In England, anyway, the third one is, of course, a St. What is this coming across me? Right, there you were really. And so the Quakers set up a network of teaching of their own,

as did other dissenting, as it called religions. And he's moved through to Manchester and he becomes a professor at 27. He's already published a book by a sort of Quaker underground, isn't it, really? Can you develop that? I wouldn't say it's an underground, though. I mean, these are very strong religious community networks. No, they're not underground.

I'm just talking about the way that contacts are made. Sure. I mean, and you're... I think, by the way, the Scottish universities are important because he could have gone to university and some of the Scottish universities. He couldn't go to the English universities because he wasn't Anglican,

but also because they require oaths and Quakers won't swear oaths. But there's plenty of Quakers who went to the University of Edinburgh. But for Dalton, given the background he came from, it's not just his Quakerism, but it's also the humble origins. Going to university at all

would actually have been a slightly tricky thing to do financially and socially. But yeah, there's no doubt he gets a lot of help from the Quaker community. So, I mean, I'm sure we'll talk at some point about the kind of Quaker intellectual influences, but the kind of social influences are really important.

because you've got those people getting him from Eaglesfield to Kendall, from Kendall to Manchester. He's also got connections in London and in Norwich and throughout Britain, thanks to Quakers. And they're quite cross-class. So they will support other Quakers even when you've got people who are much more wealthy and successful and people who are the sons of farmers and weavers,

and they will help each other. And also they, it seems to me, set up a system of teaching which includes science, mathematics, and the sciences in a way that the other universe is on the whole, don't touch. You've got lots of people in the northern provincial towns where you've got the rising industrial revolution, where you've got very strong non-conformist middle classes. There's a lot of interest in the new sciences and technologies in those areas. And it fits quite nicely into the religious perspective because of the enthusiasm for looking at the works of creation, for looking at

the works of God through creation and studying the natural world, and also being quite interested in business and new developments and how those two things might possibly tie together. So Quakerism is quite congenial to the interest he develops in the sciences. It's not famous academies like the Warrington Academy, which then closed down, but its books went to the Manchester Academy, James Sumner. You're at Manchester. How did he get a job there at the age of 27, given that he hadn't got degrees and all those rag tag and stuff? Well, the crucial man here is John Goff, who's already been mentioned.

So this somewhat famous blind late lender who Dalton had known in Kendall. And John Goff is an interesting character in this kind of journey that Dalton takes because John Goff is an ex-quaker. So he's raised Quaker. He becomes, later in his life, he becomes a Unitarian. So one of the other dissenting communities. And the Unitarians are particularly important in Manchester. So a lot of what Aileen was talking about there,

these alternative ways of doing things, these structures that are developing outside the established Church of England and its associated educational bodies. Quakers are doing this in various places. Methodists are doing it in various places. Unitarians are crucially important in building what's virtually, and they probably see it as this themselves, what's virtually an independent establishment,

they're trying to create a new system of education and a new system of ministry. And so this, the Unitarians and the people around... What do you about it? How would they describe the newness? Well, in Manchester specifically, Thomas Barnes, who becomes the principal of this new college or academy, in the 1780s, he's trying to get a project for a new college off the ground, and he produces various manifestos.

And one of the things that he's very clear about, which was unusual, but which got an audience in a manufacturing town, is that a manufacturing man can be a gentleman, and that trade knowledge and higher knowledge can not only coexist but overlap. So it's not coincidental, of course, that he's doing this, in a community where some of the wealthiest people or some of the potentially the most influential people are themselves manufacturers and who are thinking about, you know, I've made my money out of trade,

what am I going to do with my son? Do I send my son off to university and potentially end up with somebody who's very different from myself or do I raise my son to the trade and not let him have the traditional social opportunities? What would it take to get both? And so this college, the first college that's attempted along these lines in Manchester fails,

but its successor is also the direct successor of the Warrington Dissenting Academy, which has just been mentioned, and it receives the library of the Warrington Dissenting Academy, which is a big deal, which is 3,000 books. And so you suddenly have in Manchester, you have this new opportunity to develop something, something that hasn't previously existed. You've said a bit about it, but could you say a little more about the state of Manchester when he got an head academy and he arrived there? Well, John Dalton's impression of Manchester certainly is that it's a big place. It's a big and bustling place. It's nowhere near as big as London, of course, and it's nowhere near as big as Manchester is today. Its population was, I think, something around 50,000 in 1793 when he first arrived. But it's more than a market town. It's got a reputation as a manufacturing town, specifically a textile, of course, manufacturing town. And it is getting larger at a significant rate. It's a place where you're a manufacturing town. It's a place where, you're a manufacturing town. It's a place where,

new things are happening. The first mill buildings that look like sort of cliched Lowry mill buildings, the ones that define everybody's idea of a northern mill town. The first of those that look like that, that are that big and have that kind of blocky structure are in Ancoats, which becomes the first industrial suburb, those are finished towards the end of the 1790s. So they're starting to go up around the time that Dalton is first making a name for himself in Manchester. And elsewhere, of course, you know, most mills are not big structure. but you've got smaller mills popping up all over the place. You've got street after street of red brick houses suddenly appearing.

And you've got other things that are very useful to somebody like John Dalton. I've mentioned the Descending Academy from Warrington. It had that library which came to Manchester, so 3,000 books. There are about 8,000 books in Chatham's Library, which is much older established, which is a very useful facility for somebody like Dalton. A little bit later on, you've got a private subscription library in the town centre where you can go and read the latest newspapers that have come up from London and from various other places.

And later on, as Manchester becomes much more of an industrial centre, you've got access to precision engineering, precision instrument makers. And within Dalton's lifetime, it becomes the case that there are specialisms where you can get these things in London. You can't get them many other places. You can get them in Manchester. And Jim Bennett, can you talk a bit more to what's been said about the manufacturers in Manchester wanted a fusion of cultures

which would serve their character really as well as their interests. Exactly, yes. And the academy certainly has that stamp about it. Dalton is, we said that Dalton has a job there, but we haven't talked about what he's teaching. In fact, he's teaching experimental, natural philosophy or physics, as we would think, but he's teaching some mathematics, and he's teaching chemistry.

and the chemistry that he gets into experimenting with in Manchester has to do, has relationships to steam engines and so on because he's interested in vapours and gases and their action on solids and liquids. And the kind of, he comes already with an interest in vapours in the atmosphere, but he sort of moulds that to the context of concerns of Manchester manufacturing. So even at the level of research, there's an influence on what he's interested in. But I would say that it's this idea of a learned culture that would be appropriate to a northern industrial town that's established in the academy and comes to be part of another institution which we haven't mentioned yet, which is the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society.

And there too you have a, these are a group of scientifically minded, as we would say it, men, or. They were all men, I think, at this stage who came together for regular meetings. I think it was weekly meetings even. Certainly they begin publishing a journal and so on. The scientific men, why did they call it literary and philosophical? Well, there are other interests in the full range of what they do. But what we remember it for, maybe it's just that we historians of science have a skewed view of this. But I think what the Lyttonville is remembered for from that period is its scientific,

process, such as a little later on, the Dalton himself becomes president for many years and succeeds other presidents who were scientists. So there does seem to be a strong scientific bent. And that might be part of the answer to your question. That's to say if you set up a society of learned culture in Manchester, then the intellectual predominance is different, bias is different from what it might have been elsewhere. And in fact, can we just explore a bit further why so many dissenters, nonconformists, Unitarians being mentioned by James, were interests, went to the sciences. Was it just so sure, were there other reasons? Like most Protestants, non-conformists of all sorts were very committed to studying the works of God for themselves, not, say, in contrast to the Catholics who allegedly believe everything that the priests tell them.

The Protestant tradition is that you investigate God's works for yourself. And the point about this in relation to science that God's works mean both the written work, the Bible, but also the works of creation. So there's a long-standing interest in Protestantism in studying the natural world and seeing that that as the work of God and trying to understand the power, wisdom and benevolence of God

through looking at the natural world. So that's one thing that influences a general Protestant interest in the natural world. But there's another thing very specific, I think, to the late 18th century, and particularly to non-conformists, is that think about what you could do as a leisure, activity if you're in the late 18th century.

Now, if there's no television, there's no radio, there's no cinema, so what are you going to do? You might read novels, a relatively new genre, you could do that. But that's fiction and lots of non-conformist traditions would frown on wasting your time on such idle frivolity. And the theatre is not necessarily much better. And as for gambling, drinking, horse racing, that's not

really appropriate either for people from the stricter non-conformist traditions like Quakerism. So what can you do? One thing you can do is study the natural world. It's a form of what was called rational recreation. So it's recreation, but it's respectable and rational recreation. So if you want to get into botanising, as Dalton did in his early years, collecting dry plants, or start taking meteorological observations,

or indeed walking in the countryside and climbing hillvillian as many times as you want, but looking at the geography and the natural landscape, all those kinds of things can be seen as suitable forms of recreation. They're fun, but you're also appreciating God's creation while you're doing it. Did Oxford and Cambridge and indeed the London intellectual establishment have a view on what was going on in Manchester in this academy, I mean, and in the Lytton film. From their perspective down in the south, in the universities, Manchester and the Northern looks more serious,

more rational, more tied to industry. But it's kind of seen by them also as peripheral. Those people aren't part of the universities. They're not part of the Royal Society in London. They're not part of the London scientific elite. So yes, they know they're there, but it's not in until later in the 19th century, into the end of Dalton's life, that the provincial scientific communities start to play a much stronger place in British science.

And just to add to that, I mean, Dalton first gets appreciated, not at the Metropolitan Centre, but in Scotland, and indeed in France. So there is a sense in which the Londoner perhaps felt they didn't need to worry about what was happening in Manchester, but of course, eventually, Dalton does come to matter. and that's part of the triumph of Dalton's career that in the end he is a national and international figure.

It's influenced by Lavoisier as much as by priestly, isn't he? In the Great Paris, so can I? Do you want you please say? Oh, I was just going to say that although we often say that he's not appreciated in London, you know, he did get invited to give lectures there quite early on. So actually he does have an early London influence. But yes, at a different kind of institution.

And that, I think that matters. James, James Sumner, it's been mentioned by Jim, I think and by yourself, that he made a public name for himself with the publication of meteorological observations and essays in 1793. What research did he carry out? This one is interesting, the meteorological observations. It's a kind of a journeyman production. It's a young man with a great deal of application and a certain amount of skill and an awful lot of doggedness, but no formal training, setting himself up and saying, I want to publish. I want to publish my work, I want to produce things that are useful to the general community.

It's partly an account of his observations in meteorology, so taking records of temperatures and pressures, records of storms and winds and various other phenomena. It's partly a kind of a, it started out, the nucleus of the project, it started out as a kind of a how-to. He wanted to explain two other readers, how to fashion and use a thermometer or a barometer and various other equipment. But he gradually gets more ambitious as he's writing it. And the thing that's most interesting about it later on

is his account of the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights, which he actually goes out with a theodalite. He acquires a theodal light, and he goes out and he tries to measure the height of the aurora. And he determines from observations of the shape of this phenomenon, that it's, his big idea is that it's a magnetic phenomenon because it's symmetrical about the magnetic meridian. And so he publishes this as what is to him a new discovery. Along with a lot of records and information about more familiar meteorological phenomena, what he doesn't know until he

gets to Manchester is that some of the discoveries in this work, which he originated independently, had already been made and published in some cases quite a long time previously. So he's very unusual because he's somebody who is doing scientific research, as we would say, at a fairly high level. But he's not had access to the standard resources. He's not seen the abridgments of the philosophical transactions

of the Royal Society, which is a very, very standard thing to have access to, that would have given him leads on some of these things. Jim Bennett, so how did this affect? That shows a sort of, dissonance there. How did this affect the way he led his career or forged his career? When he came back, just take an instance, that's very, he comes back, he's made these wonderful discoveries, and he discovers that these discoveries have been discovered years before by other people and he didn't know about them. What happens then?

Well, he's, I think he's not faced by that particularly. Doughton has a great inner core of self-belief. And one of the things that perhaps doesn't always work to his advantage is that Once he's taken up a position, he sticks to it. And I don't know if that's something, again, in the Quaker background, that there is this sense of an inner knowledge that he has acquired and that he believes and that he holds almost as a sort of creed. So when Dalton starts interacting with what other people think, he doesn't necessarily think, oh, I got that wrong,

I'll take something else on board or I'll modify my views. It's not that he's virulently dogmatic at all, again, one wouldn't be as a Quaker, but he does have a great confidence in himself and his own views. So this interaction is very interesting in Dothan, that although completely without formal education, I mean, it's not even that he's been to a dissenting academy to do science, remember. I mean, he hasn't even done that, let alone be into a university. Nonetheless, he does stick to his guns when he discovers that other people are in the same field and doing different things. We mentioned this background at the beginning

It's been referred to, but the last time When you read about the Enlightenment in London It includes as many people as a club I think, but it's very much a gentleman's affair Or somebody who is so idiosyncratic That he defies definition like Newton How did Dalton fare among that lot? He was in an order to be done there, it has to be said.

I mean he goes down, we mentioned the lectures and he meets Humphrey Davy and the like and so on and he talks about he tries to get tips on how to operate in this society when he goes to give his lectures at the at the Royal Institution he has a rehearsal

with Davy I think in the audience and Davy gives him some tips about how to conduct himself he was always he kept his accent all through his life and that was strange the Ian now were kept for his Quaker acquaintances but nonetheless he was clearly

an unusual presence in the London society and they they accommodated him I think with a certain curiosity I mean he he was someone who had clear who had good ideas and held them clearly but he didn't operate as the rest of them but it was open enough for him to he got Faradet as an example hadn't he

equally humble origin yes I'm sorry but Faraday was more charismatic and wow the London the London audience in the way that Dalton was never going going to do. He was a worthy presence in the lecturing scene, but he wasn't a star. On the other hand, Aileen, he was massively celebrated by Manchester people and others for the effectiveness of his public lectures, not only in the north of England, but as we've said

before, in Europe. So he must have been some good, Jim. Yeah, it's an interesting one, because when you look at accounts of people who met him, people in Manchester really like him, and his close friends really like him. And he's said to be a good conversationalist, a good person to have you're at your event, there's one occasion at a British Association meeting later on where he basically describes the life and soul of the event. Take the London reports of people who met him and you get things like he was gruff and awkward and didn't come across very well. And you wonder how much of this is as a stranger or as an insider, or is it his accent?

And it's not, as Jim says, it's not the quakerness of the accent. It's presumably the northerness of the accent. And he's just from a different background. He doesn't quite socialise with them as normal. But within Manchester and the north, Yes. I mean, he gives lectures to fee-paying crowds in Manchester, in Leeds, and Birmingham, in Glasgow, and Edinburgh, and he gets invited back to those places. So he clearly does it with some success. And he has those 40,000 people filing past his coffee in his death, which is a lot of people at that time, a lot of people at any time.

Certainly at that time. Just a tiny point, a tiny point, I mean, when he does get taken up by the London A lead, who takes him up? Babbage. And that's very interesting, because Babbage is the self-proclaimed outsider and reformer down in London. And it's Babi true champions Dalton's cause in the end, and that's very indicative. But that's late in his life. Yes. Because by the time Dalton becomes one of these eminence gris within the scientific community, he's now coming towards the end of his life, we're into the 1830s by this point in time. And I think that's a different kind of use of

Dalton. Whereas when you're looking at him as younger man, I think that's different. Well, let's go back to when he was younger man. James Sumner, he was interested in how people see colours. What work did he do in that area? This is fascinating. It's the, one of the first things he does as quickly as he can when he gets to Manchester is to join the literary and philosophical society. And within a few weeks of having joined, he's presenting his observations to the society on the subject of inability to perceive colour. Now, this is fascinating because he had a degree of colour blindness himself. And this is a phenomenon that's not widely known or understood. It's been written up. It was in the philosophical transactions in 1777, but it's not widely known about. So he's somebody who is diagnosed in himself the lack of ability to perceive a thing, the nature of which will always be completely unknown to him. And he writes it up in a manner to be comprehensible to an audience of people with perfectly good colour vision, which is quite a spectacular diagnostic achievement.

And also, this time he's working towards building the building blocks, building up the building blocks of matter. Who's influencing him at this time? Where did you get the inspiration for that? Yes, well, atomism is a pervasive idea. I mean, in different forms, everyone's some sort of an atomist. I mean, it's an ancient idea. But once you get away from Aristotelian forms and qualities

as the characteristics of the material world and you get towards materialism and mechanism, you almost inevitably start thinking about the tiny particles and the level of action underneath the visible is made up of particulate interaction and corpuscles and so on. So in the 17th century, Robert Boyle has a sort of has a corpuscular account of the material word. Newton has an atomic account where the, what he calls the solid, massy, hard, impenetrable particles have forces that interact with each other and so on. And this is very current. It's everywhere.

But by the 18th century, the chemists certainly are getting really disillusioned with all of this. I mean, what's the point of it? I mean, it's all very well. We're all particular in a sense, a particular thing. but not much we can do about that at the level of operative chemistry. And Lavoisier say redefines the element, not in, elements not in terms of what they might be in themselves, but what operations we can perform.

That's to say an element is a substance that can't be further reduced as far as we know to something more simple. So that's a very operational definition. So itemism was always there. What's missing from the atomism that was always there is any sense that these particles are characteristic of the elements, that they're individual, that they differ from other particles of other elements, or the atoms, let's say, of other elements, but they are all the same.

And the other thing that differs is any way of characterizing them in a measurable way. And, well, weight is going to come into this in Dalton's case. So Dalton reforms it in those two important ways. he makes the world fundamentally heterogeneous by having different kinds of atoms characteristic of the elements and of finding a register which we can use for characterizing their properties, that's to say, their comparative weights.

Haleen Fyne Fyne, just fill in his way of life at this time and how he was addressing this extraordinarily difficult subject. So he was, as we've already mentioned, the littering philosophical society has come up. This was really, really central to his life, and both to his private life actually as well as his public life, because he lived most of his life as a border in someone else's house with one room. And the literary and philosophical society, of which he was secretary, vice president, president, became his workspace. So there he's got, exactly, I mean, he's got a space to keep his instruments, his books, and he's got a place to go and work. So the literary and philosophical society is very central to this. It gives him the space to work. It gives him, of course, a community to talk to.

and it also gives him a place to announce his discoveries. So he gave, on average, two, three, four papers a year to the literary and philosophical society about his thoughts on other people's work because by this time he does have access to other periodicals. He's clearly reacting to what other people are doing around Europe. You can see that in the way the papers he gives. And he's also presenting his new researches.

And what's quite important for his reputation beyond Manchester is that some of these papers then go into print in the literary and philosophical society's memoirs. And once they're in print, then other people can get hold of outside of Manchester. And some of those papers, including some of the famous ones on Tommy Weight that we're going to get to, and those then get reprinted in other journals in Britain, but also in France and in Germany, which is what really helps to build that.

So you've got someone who's starting off in this very tight community in Manchester, where he's almost living and working inside that literary and philosophical community. They're the first audience for everything he does, but they also help him get out to the wider audiences. Jim Bennett mentioned his life, the way he ran his life very early on, but it's sort of very attractive, isn't he has this one room opposite the litter and philosophic. He gets up, we're told, by one of you anyway, he goes across the, he lights the fire in his study, he comes back, he has his breakfast, he has his breakfast, he leans out the window, he takes all the observations, and people see him, now there he is, taking his observations again, and he goes back and works there, and he goes back and works there, he plays bowls, that's about his only leisure activity, smokes a pipe, and goes for long walks. Well, that's a life. It is. Three times a day, you know, he took those observations and it was said you could set your clock by it, watching him come out of his bedroom window, and the annual trip to the Lake District and the going hill walking very much routine.

And yet, you know, he also breaks routine because he goes on these lecturing tours. So he does go away from home. And the first time he goes to London has actually attend Quaker meetings. So he goes to meet other Quakers in other towns. He goes to go on lecturing tours. And later on in life, he goes to Paris and to London because he's now become an eminent man of science. and so he gets invited to these places. So yes, he's a man of routine and regularity and modest habits and all that kind of thing.

But he isn't the sort of Quaker who will utterly refuse to engage in other social activities and will only stay there. He does go out. James Sumner, he's, let's come to the development of atomic theory, which he first spoke about publicly in 1803. What were his ideas in this field? Yes, that's the great question that people always trip up over. If the idea of the atom is ancient, and so many people have been talking about atoms, Isaac Newton has a concept that is atomic, what is it that Dalton did when he came up with his so-called new atomic theory? And if you look at the development of Dalton's ideas, it's very, very complicated because he wasn't trying to do what we would think of as chemistry. He was trying to come up with an explanation of the nature of gases. He was trying to explain things like, he understood that, as we, he had the modern understanding about air, that it was a mixture of, of oxygen and what we call nitrogen, why don't they separate out? That's what was on his mind.

But the explanation that he came up with, it had crucial features, which included the idea that there were different elements. What was particular to each element above anything else was weight, okay? Oxygen atoms weigh the same, hydrogen atoms weigh the same, but oxygen atoms are much heavier than hydrogen atoms. And his other great idea, or what was picked out as being a particularly great and valuable idea, was that these atoms combine in simple proportions to make what we would call molecules. He's still using the term atoms for these things. So what he would have called an atom of water, he thought was one atom of hydrogen and one atom of oxygen, not our ratio, of course, we would say two to one, H2O, in combination somehow. How did he get there?

I mean, is he imagining it? Is he actually measuring it? How is he doing it? It's a very complicated gestation, which is not, as far as Dalton's concerned, it's not strongly based on experimentation. Dalton does not have a great reputation as an experimentalist, despite his fascination with observation, his very, very regular observing habits. He was, he had very limited range of equipment in the sense of glassware and so forth. He did very little precision measurements later on, actually. So Dalton throws this idea out there, which he's picked. up. He's worked out by various observations and considerations on the nature of gases and how, for instance, what we call the law of partial pressures, the way that the pressure contribution

from multiple gases in a mixture can be separated out and treated independently. And if you add them all together, then that works out. It's things like that that are really driving him. Those are not necessarily convincing in their own right. They wouldn't be convincing in modern terms. But other chemists, look at what he's doing and find it fantastically used. useful for explaining things they have observed in other areas. For instance, the tendency of certain substances to react with those substances to produce acid salts in different proportions. Jim, Jim Bennett, what influence did his work have on other, on the scientists of the day and since? Well, it's mixed, I would say. I mean, some people are convinced by this atomic theory and

are willing to go along with this. Others are willing to use the laws of constant proportions of chemical combinations that rely behind that Dalton rationalizes in terms of atoms. And they're prepared to accept that. But they don't like what they would think of as the metaphysical dimension to Dalton's account. That's to say, they don't think they have to believe in the existence of unique atoms for every element in order to use those laws that are operative in chemistry. The other thing that people don't like, some people don't like, about Dalton is that he is saying that nature is fundamentally heterogeneous, that there are all

these different atoms, and there's a strong impulse, which I think still exists today, to look for unity in nature. And Boyle, as I said before, was more unified in his view and so on. And Humphrey Davy, for example, doesn't like that. There's a kind of... So they don't like it for other reasons than science. That's true. You're implying. Well, absolutely. I mean, there are, of course, I mean, is it other than science to have an aesthetic dimension to what you believe, or a philosophical dimension to what you believe? I don't think those things necessarily sit outside science, but they're certainly not the sort of experimental science

that we would think of that are driving some of those rejections. You can perfectly well be a kind of Daltonian operative chemist and be agnostic, completely agnostic, on the existence of real atoms. Yeah, I was just thinking there's so many ways in which you can, you can't always tell, if you're thinking just with science, how would you choose between one explanation another, especially when you're dealing with unseen and unseeable things,

you've got to decide what seems to you like a plausible explanation, and that's going to be determined partly by your religious perspective, your philosophical perspective, your aesthetic perspective, whatever it is. Now, I mean, yes, Count knows as inside or outside science or not, but it's certainly outside the way we sometimes think of the scientific method nowadays. It's much more about your other beliefs. Yes, I just want to come back quickly. That wasn't continuously the case.

I mean, Dalton's atoms were very accommodating. They could accommodate new structural, approaches to chemistry. Dalton doesn't have a spatial arrangement of his atoms, but other people could bring that into the practice of chemistry. Electrochemistry could have an atomic dimension to it as well. So Dalton's atoms could be moulded in different ways. They were very, I think, conceptually very flexible

and accommodating to other forms of chemistry. And that's one of the ways, several of the ways, they come into the practice of chemistry generally. So his explanation is prompted the explanations of others. Yes. James, James Semler, 40,000 people filed past his coffee, He had this in... Why was he so popular?

I think so this is 40,000 people in Manchester at the then Manchester Town Hall. Dalton was very, very important to the development of Manchester on the world cultural stage. He dies in 1844, and by that point, Manchester has massively expanded in size

and in its role in sort of international understanding of the way the world now works. It was a city of knowledge, really, wasn't it? Well, that's what it hadn't been, you see. It was a city of industry. Now, this is, there was a dividing line between science and industry, which we don't recognize because, I mean, people in Manchester were working to abolish that division and it's now largely gone. If you look at the way people talk about the economy and the role of science in the knowledge economy. But in those days, Manchester could be very important as a place where people made things and people got rich without necessarily having the associated social status. But why was he so popular? because he was not simply an industrialist. He was useful to industrialists, but he was a man of scientific knowledge. And surprisingly, there wasn't really anybody else who fitted that bill. Dalton was really Manchester's only scientific star.

Finally, Jim, what was his greatest legacy? Well, we still have Daltonian atoms everywhere in chemistry. I mean, if you think about, we may think now I know that the atoms are more complicated than Dalton thought. But if you think of the model of DNA, say, those are Dalton atoms that make that up. So there are two prongs, I think, to his legacy. There's that.

There's the atomic one. But also, he's a new man in terms of how you can be a scientist. I mean, he's a professional scientist. He just does science through teaching, through publication, and through research. And he makes an entire career out of that.

And that's a... He's one example of a model for how to be a scientist in the future. Well, thank you very much, Jim Bennett, Alien Five and James Sumner. Next week we'll be talking about the ancient Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, widely regarded as the first great work of literature. Thank you for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Did you remit out anything important? I don't know about important, but I thought it would be fun to say that Dalton's final paper read to them Manchester or Litton Phil was about 50 years of re-and-fall in Manchester.

Isn't that true? I think, yes. I can't swear to that, but certainly he was notorious in his later years for, if nobody else had got anything to present, Dalton was a reliable, as president of the literary and philosophical society, a reliable candidate to come and talk about the weather again. I was thinking when you were answering the question about funerals, I was thinking, well, another thing to think about is, it's public spectacle, isn't it?

I mean, what else do you do as a kind of, leisure activity or as a public spectacle, you don't have football matches to go to you go to hangings, you go to races and celebrity funerals because that's essentially what it is. It's a big civic event. The story of John Dalton, as a Quaker, as a plain Quaker, having

this inc... And that the cortege was a mile long to take him down to Aldwick's cemetery where he was interred, and then later on this enormous, horrible marble pink sarcophagus type of fare was erected over the top of it. The local Quaker community was not happy.

Oh, you've got to say, yeah. Did they want it to be black, or did they object to the psychophagus? It was the ornateness and the vulgarity of the whole proceeding that bothered them. It's not there now. It was the land was cleared eventually, and a playing field was built over the top of it. How does they feel about the statue? We haven't mentioned the statue, because a statue raised by public subscription and so on, which everyone, of course, in Manchester now knows.

What was the Quaker take on memorializing him in that way? I couldn't tell you was to the statue specifically. I mean, John Dalton sat for that statue, so he must have tolerated it. So, again, he's swimming... Did they put it in a tour? I can't remember. I spoke with you, didn't I? Yeah, he is dressed in an approximation of robes, of doctoral robes, something like that. So there's a story we didn't get, was, of course, the issue of what Dalton should wear when he gets presented to the royal court, when he's sitting for that statue.

It's when he goes to London, and Babbage managed to engineer a presentation. at the court of King William. Now, traditionally you wear court dress. This is elaborate, which doesn't fit with Quakerism, and also involves a sword, which as a weapon, does not fit with what you should do as a Quaker. So what is Dalton going to wear? And the answer is that he wears his Oxford doctoral robes

because he was given an honorary degree just a year or so beforehand. They are bright red. So the question is, of course, did Dalton, with his colour blindness, understand what he really looked like in these bright red gowns? Yes. We've only got Babbage's word for this. It's a good story.

The other thing I was a bit concerned about one point in the discussion was the idea of all these Anglicans going out, you know, drinking and going to the theatre and so on. That is that you had to be a non-conformist to live a devout and modest life. And I'm sure that's not entirely true. There are quite a lot of Church of England ministers who are carefully studying meteorology and so on and cultivating the natural world. So I think we need just put that in to be all together. We have the supposedly the oldest sports in the world up in government. of the Grasmere sports, which is old-fashioned wrestling and so on. And the weather is traditionally taken by the vicar,

who has been collecting things in a test tube. There are more than 700 programmes to download and listen to for free from the In Our Time website. We'll also find a reading list for this episode.