Typical of the courses available was that of John Banks in 1782. He also forgot to include the public lectures given by itinerant natural philosophers (Kendal being, among other things, an important staging post on the coach route from London to Scotland). Nor did he refer to the stimulus available to such a talented and enterprising youth from the continued flow of Quaker visitors. The collection was rounded out with various items of apparatus, including a two–foot reflecting telescope, a double microscope, and (for £21) a double–barreled air pump with its subsidiary equipment.ĭalton did not feel such valuable resources as these worth even a mention in the accounts of his early life that he was later to authorize for publication. Later purchases included Musschenbroek’s Natural Philosophy, the six–volume Works of the Honourable Robert Boyle, and Buffon’s Natural History, among others. George Bewely, himself a distant cousin of Dalton, was quick to purchase not only Newton’s Principia, but also the supporting texts of Gravesande, Pemberton, and Thomas Rutherforth. More immediately important than the web of contacts the benefactors’ list displays was the use that the school’s first pricipal made of the £150 available for the library. The list of benefactors was headed by John Fothergill, the London physician and a personal friend of Robinson, and included such wealthy Midland entrepreneurs as Abraham Darby and Richard Reynolds. The school to which Dalton moved was newly built and equipped by the Quakers. In 1781 he was rescued by an invitation to replace his elder brother as assistant in a Kendal boarding school, forty miles away. Robison’s encouragement is reflected in the story of how John at the age of thirteen copied out verbatim an issue of the Ladies’ Diary, a popular but by no means trivial annual devoted to mathematics and philosophy.Īt this time Dalton’s future seemed uncertain, and he was of necessity put to work as a laborer on the local small–holdings. He also quickly attracted the attention of Elihu Robinson, the most prominent of the local Friends and a naturalist of no mean stature. He made rapid progress in the village Quaker school, which he himself unsuccessfully took over at the age of twelve. This network of connections, coupled with the sect’s strong emphasis on education and the interest in natural philosophy displayed by so many of its members, is the key to understanding the peculiarly favorable context in which Dalton grew and matured as a scientific thinker.Īlthough his father appears to have been somewhat feckless, his mother came from a more prosperous local family, and John was strongly influenced by her determination and tenacity. Strong links were forged between these Northern Friends, Quaker manufacturers in the Midlands, London Quaker merchants, and Philadelphia residents. The area was thus peculiarly important within the developing international life of the Society of Friends. George Fox had earlier seen his first major evangelistic success in this region, whole villages and families (including the Daltons) undergoing conversion to his doctrines. In the eighteenth century, west Cumberland enjoyed considerable prosperity as a mining and trading area, with an important series of coastal ports engaged in local and overseas commerce. Only when Jonathan, a bachelor, died in 1834 did the then considerably augmented acreage finally pass to John Dalton, who by that time had independently accumulated wealth sufficient to his own frugal and celibate ways. The property Joseph then inherited passed at his death the following year to Jonathan, his elder son. Joseph, himself a younger son, had no holding until his elder brother died without issue in 1786. From that time the family seems to have owned and farmed a small amount of land. The Daltons can be traced back in west Cumberland at least to the late sixteenth century. John was the second son of a modest Quaker weaver, Joseph Dalton, and Mary Greenup. If the provincial Dissenter of dubiously middle–class background, obscure education, and self–made opportunity is the characteristics figure of late eighteenth–century English natural philosophy, then John Dalton is the classic example of the species. Eaglesfield, Cumberland, England, 6 September 1766 d.
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