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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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John Dalton
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(1766–1844) Self-taught chemist who was the first to provide an account of the atomic theory which is central to modern chemistry. The notion that matter is made up of independent atoms goes back to ancient Greece as a philosophical concept, and it began to enter the realm of material science with the recognition of elements as irreducibly pure substances (a process in which Robert *Boyle's Sceptical Chymist of 1661 was an important step). But it was Dalton who suggested a coherent scheme in which different elements have atoms of differing size and weight – atoms which are themselves indestructible but which combine in new arrangements to form compounds.
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He made out a first brief table of relative atomic weights in 1803, and described the system more fully in A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808), thus putting in place the structure which was developed by others into the full periodic table.
The red-green colour blindness known as daltonism was a disability from which Dalton himself suffered. He described it in a paper of 1794 to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society.
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