John Dalton Proposes His Atomic Theory and Lays the Foundation of Modern Chemistry
Overview
As the nineteenth century dawned a significant problem that remained in the chemical sciences was the ultimate nature of matter. Was matter continuous and therefore had no finer structure or was it discontinuous and thus made of tiny particles? The chemical revolution due to the work of Antoine Lavoisier (1743-1794) and his circle that had occurred in the last two decades of the eighteenth century had clarified the concept of what elements are, developed a comprehensive and consistent vocabulary of chemistry, and led to the introduction of quantitative methods in chemical investigations. However, to fully understand the nature of chemical reactions one needed to have a way to visualize how the elements combined together. The atomic theory of matter as proposed by John Dalton in his New System of Chemical Philosophy (Part I,1808; Part II,1810) was the first successful attempt to solve this problem.
Background
The concept that matter may ultimately be composed of particles originated in Greek natural philosophy. In the fifth century B.C. Democritus(c. 460-370 B.C.) proposed that matter was composed of individual indestructible particles (called "atoms" in Greek for "uncuttable") and that the size and shape of these particles were responsible for the properties of matter.
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