Dalton Quotes

“John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.”
― Isaac Asimov

“Hey, I'm still the walking wounded, you know," he protested.
"You were shot on the other side," Rosie said drily. "And since when do you and Dalton agree on anything?"
"We are men." Pip and Dalton straightened up. "We settle out differences through fighting and drink." He held up the fine crystal tumbler, then frowned at it. "Though maybe not in this kind of glass.”
― Lara Morgan, Dark Star

“John Dalton was a very singular Man: He has none of the manners or ways of the world. A tolerable mathematician He gained his livelihood I believe by teaching the mathematics to young people. He pursued science always with mathematical views. He seemed little attentive to the labours of men except when they countenanced or confirmed his own ideas... He was a very disinterested man, seemed to have no ambition beyond that of being thought a good Philosopher. He was a very coarse Experimenter & almost always found the results he required.—Memory & observation were subordinate qualities in his mind. He followed with ardour analogies & inductions & however his claims to originality may admit of question I have no doubt that he was one of the most original philosophers of his time & one of the most ingenious.”
― Humphry Davy

“Atoms are round balls of wood invented by Dr. Dalton.

(Answer given by a pupil to a question on atomic theory, as reported by Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe.)”
― Henry Enfield Roscoe

“[John] Dalton was a man of regular habits. For fifty-seven years he walked out of Manchester every day; he measured the rainfall, the temperature—a singularly monotonous enterprise in this climate. Of all that mass of data, nothing whatever came. But of the one searching, almost childlike question about the weights that enter the construction of these simple molecules—out of that came modern atomic theory. That is the essence of science: ask an impertinent question, and you are on the way to the pertinent answer.”
― Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

“In the vestibule of the Manchester Town Hall are placed two life-sized marble statues facing each other. One of these is that of John Dalton ... the other that of James Prescott Joule. ... Thus the honour is done to Manchester's two greatest sons—to Dalton, the founder of modern Chemistry and of the atomic theory, and the laws of chemical-combining proportions; to Joule, the founder of modern physics and the discoverer of the Law of Conservation of Energy.
One gave to the world the final proof ... that in every kind of chemical change no loss of matter occurs; the other proved that in all the varied modes of physical change, no loss of energy takes place.”
― Henry Enfield Roscoe