Cockermouth Info

EAGLESFIELD

John Dalton and the Atom

Lying between the mountains and the sea, it has given to the world three men whose names live on. Here, six centuries ago, was born Robert Eaglesfield, who as a priest heard the confessions of an English queen. Going to Oxford, he bought a few buildings and founded Queen’s College, beginning with 12 fellows and 70 poor boys. and finding his own rest at last in the college chapel.

Very different is the story of Fletcher Christian, who was born about 1753 in the house called Moorland Close. Here he passed his first years, going to school not far away at Cockermouth. The sea called him, and Fletcher Christian is for ever remembered as the leader of the mutineers in that amazing drama of the ocean, the Mutiny of the Bounty.

These two men went from here into the world, one to add some… thing to a university, the other to stir England with a story. But the third and greatest son of Eaglesfield made no such stir, and even here as a boy his adventures were those of the mind. We think of him as we see his humble cottage, proud of the tablet which records his birth; we think of him as we see the Quaker meeting-house where as a boy he ran his own little school; and we think of him in the church, which is called after him and has a memorial put here by the Royal Society of London. He was John Dalton, immortal in science and the founder of the Atomic Theory.

Destined to make Chemistry a science, John Dalton was born in 1766, of Quaker parents who eked out the profits of a tiny farm by weaving. The boy left school at ten, but was helped in later years by John Gough, the blind philosopher, to a knowledge of mathematics and languages.

While still a boy Dalton noted that the colours of military uniforms at a review did not differ in his sight from the colour of the grass. He pondered the problem, and in early manhood was able to reveal to science a physical disability not guessed at till then colour- blindness, a subject of immense importance where signals are controlled by light.

He became a schoolmaster at 12, with a barn for a school and babies for scholars, and in due course equipped himself so well as to be appointed Professor of Mathematics and Natural Philosophy at New College, Manchester.

He made important discoveries in relation to gases, the force of steam, and the elasticity of vapours, and was only 37 when he communicated to the Manchester Philosophical Society the first results of his inquiry into “the relative weights of the ultimate particles.” A year later he startled the world with his famous theory of Atomic Weights.

Taking hydrogen as the unit, he gave 21 atomic weights, each expressed in atoms of hydrogen. When at last appreciated and accepted, the discovery was declared to be the greatest scientific advance of the age. Dalton and the great chemists who followed him went to the grave believing they had found in the atom the ultimate and indivisible form of matter, though in our own day their successors have split it into electrons, whose mass and velocity they have recorded. John Dalton discovered a new realm for scientific research, a universe teeming with lesser worlds.

The philosopher’s experiments were carried out with the most primitive instruments, and even of these he was not complete master, but such was his unwearying application, his unfailing memory. and his careful systematising. that he triumphed over all difficulties.

He died at Manchester in 1844, and in four days over 40,000 persons filed past his coffin.