One of the first things we learn in chemistry are atomic symbols to represent different elements. While what we see today has undergone transformation through the centuries, the credit for the ideation goes to a teacher.
John Dalton was born in 1766 into a family of tradesmen in England. The youngest of the three children in the family who survived to adulthood, Dalton studied in the local grammar school. But when he was just 12 years old, the school moved into the hands of Dalton’s elder brother, who sought his support in teaching.
Teacher at 12
Within two years, the brothers bought another school in a nearby town and taught close to 60 students there. After teaching here for nearly 10 years, Dalton took up a teaching position in Manchester.
Despite being a teacher himself, Dalton continued to learn throughout and he was particularly influenced by Elihu Robinson and John Gough. As amateur meteorologists, Robinson and Gough impressed upon Dalton, who took to it himself, maintaining daily weather records from 1787.
Law of partial pressures
By observing meteorological phenomena, Dalton was able to show that air isn’t a vast chemical solvent as thought of by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, but in fact is a mechanical system. His law of partial pressure states that in a mixture of non-reacting gases, the pressure exerted by each gas is independent of the pressure exerted by other gases, and that the total pressure is the sum of the pressures of each gas.
It was meteorology that led Dalton to his view of atomism, though attempts to trace precisely how Dalton arrived at his theory haven’t been successful. Even though his idea that each element had its own kind of atom was counter-intuitive at that time, Dalton remained convinced and focussed his energies on determining the relative mass of each different kind of atom.
Having been a chemistry teacherfor many years, Dalton finally got to perform actual research on the subject. He proceeded to calculate atomic weights from percentage compositions of compounds and came up with likely atomic structures.
Uses symbols first time
On September 3, 1803, Dalton made an entry to his logbook titled “Observations on the Ultimate Particles of Bodies and their Combinations” in which he used symbols to represent elements – the first such instance. Within a month and a half, Dalton described the method he used to measure masses of various elements, and in the next two years came up with the tenets of atomic theory.
In the decades that followed, the atomic symbols were simplified, enhanced and put in order in a periodic table. And Dalton, the teacher and meteorologist who gave us those symbols, came to be best known for his atomic theory.
