But until the very last stages of those investigations, Dalton was neither a chemist nor interested in chemistry. Instead, he was a meteorologist investigating the, for him, physical problems of the absorption of gases by water and of water by the atmosphere. Partly because his training was in a different specialty and partly because of his own work in that specialty, he approached these problems with a paradigm different from that of contemporary chemists.
Dalton "invented" atomic theory for chemistry
