John Dalton

In honour of his work with ratios and chemicals that led to the idea of atoms and atomic weights, many chemists and biochemists use the (still unofficial) unit dalton (abbreviated Da) to denote one atomic mass unit, or 1/12 the weight of a neutral atom of carbon-12. He died in 1947 of a cerebral hemorrhage at the age of 83 in Fair Lane, his Dearborn estate, and is buried in the Ford Cemetery in Detroit. However, an eye was preserved at the Royal Institution, and a 1990s study on DNA extracted from the eye showed that he had lacked the pigment that gives sensitivity to the colour green, the classic condition known as a deuteranope. In ill health, he ceded the presidency to his grandson Henry Ford II on September 21, 1945, and went into retirement. Post-mortem examination showed that the humours of the eye were perfectly normal. Edsel's 1943 death brought Henry Ford out of retirement. He had hypothesised that his aqueous humour might be coloured blue. Ford suffered an initial stroke in 1938, after which he turned over the running of his company to Edsel.

Dalton had requested that his eyes be examined after his death, in an attempt to discover the cause of his colour-blindness. The foundation no longer has any association with the Ford Motor Company, nor with the family or descendants of Henry Ford. It now stands in the entrance to Manchester Town Hall. The Foundation has grown immensely and, by 1950, had become national and international in scope.[2]. A bust of him, by Francis Legatt Chantrey, was publicly subscribed for him and placed in the entrance hall of the Royal Manchester Institution. Henry Ford, with his son Edsel, founded the Ford Foundation in 1936 as a local philanthropic organization with a broad charter to promote human welfare. On the 27th he fell from his bed and was found lifeless by his attendant. His knowledge of the Ontario town of the same name is believed to have led to the renaming of the Georgia town, formerly known as Ways Station.

In May 1844 he had another stroke and on July 26 he recorded with trembling hand his last meteorological observation. He contributed substantially to the community, building a chapel and schoolhouse and employing a large number of local residents. He had suffered a first attack in 1837, and a second in 1838 had left him enfeebled, both physically and mentally, though he remained able to make experiments. Ford also maintained a vacation residence (known as the "Ford Plantation") in Richmond Hill, Georgia. Dalton died in Manchester in 1844 of paralysis. (The airfield was across the street and is now the site of a Ford Motor Company test track.) He heavily sponsored the Stout Metal Airplane Company, which developed the Ford Tri-Motor, an early airliner. He attended several of the earlier meetings of the British Association at York, Oxford, Dublin and Bristol. Ford was an early promoter of aviation, building the Dearborn Inn as the first airport hotel.

In 1822 he paid a short visit to Paris, where he met many distinguished resident scientists. Lloyd Shaw. Johns (1771–1845), in George Street, Manchester, where his daily round of laboratory work and tuition was broken only by annual excursions to the Lake District and occasional visits to London. Which he shared with his friend Dr. W. Ford also had an interest in American folk music and frequently sponsored square dances, one of his particular interests. He lived for more than a quarter of a century with his friend the Rev. It was opened in 1929 as the Edison Institute and, although greatly modernized, remains open today.

Dalton never married, though there is evidence that he enjoyed the company of educated and refined women. About the same time, he began collecting materials for his museum, which had a theme of practical technology. In 1833 Lord Grey's government conferred on him a pension of £150, raised in 1836 to £300. It may have inspired the creation of Old Sturbridge Village as well. Six years previously he had been made a corresponding member of the French Académie des Sciences, and in 1830 he was elected as one of its eight foreign associates in place of Davy. This plan never saw fruition, but Ford repeated it with the creation of Greenfield Village in Dearborn, Michigan. However, in 1822 he was proposed without his knowledge, and on election paid the usual fee. He moved the schoolhouse from the Mary had a little lamb nursery rhyme from Sterling, Massachusetts and purchased the historical Wayside Inn.

In 1810 he was asked by Davy to offer himself as a candidate for the fellowship of the Royal Society, but declined, possibly for financial reasons. In the 1920s, Ford began work to turn Sudbury, Massachusetts into an Americana-themed historical village. However, he was deficient, it would seem, in the qualities that make an attractive lecturer, being harsh and indistinct in voice, ineffective in the treatment of his subject, and singularly wanting in the language and power of illustration. Ford had an interest in what today would be known as "Americana". In 1804 he was chosen to give a course of lectures on natural philosophy at the Royal Institution in London, where he delivered another course in 1809–1810. [Detroit News, July 31, 1938.]. Before he had propounded the atomic theory he had already attained a considerable scientific reputation. The decoration was given "in recognition of [Ford's] pioneering in making motor cars available for the masses." The award was accompanied by a personal congratulatory message from Adolf Hitler.

His library, he was once heard to declare, he could carry on his back, yet reputedly he had not read half the books it contained. Ford was the first American and the fourth person given this award, at the time Nazi Germany's highest honorary award given to foreigners. He always objected to the chemical notation devised by Jöns Jakob Berzelius, although by common consent it was much simpler and more convenient than his own cumbersome system of circular symbols. In July of that year, Ford was awarded (and accepted) the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle (Großkreuz des Deutschen Adlerordens). Even after its elementary character had been settled by Davy, he persisted in using the atomic weights he himself had adopted, even when they had been superseded by the more accurate determinations of other chemists. In 1938, for instance, it opened an assembly plant in Berlin, the purpose of which was to supply trucks to the Wehrmacht. He held peculiar and quite unfounded views about chlorine. Ford's indirect financial backing of the Nazis was also undeniable, as Ford Motor Company was active in Germany's military buildup prior to World War II.

Thus he distrusted, and probably never fully accepted, Gay-Lussac's conclusions as to the combining volumes of gases. Regardless of whether direct financial support was provided, Ford repeatedly voiced his overt approval of Hitler's theories. of his New System he says he had so often been misled by taking for granted the results of others that he determined to write as little as possible but what I can attest by my own experience, but this independence he carried so far that it sometimes resembled lack of receptivity. However, a 1933 Congressional investigation into the matter was unable to substantiate whether contributions were actually sent. i. in the 1920s, and Winifred Wagner, daughter-in-law of Richard Wagner, who said they requested funds from Ford to aid the National Socialist movement in Germany. In the preface to the second part of vol. This can in part be traced to statements from Kurt Ludecke, Germany's representative to the U.S.

Sir Humphry Davy described him as a very coarse experimenter, who almost always found the results he required, trusting to his head rather than his hands. There is also some evidence that Henry Ford gave Adolf Hitler direct financial backing when Hitler was first starting out in politics. As an investigator, Dalton was content with rough and inaccurate instruments, though better ones were readily attainable. Henry Ford spent years bestowing gushing praise on Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime, although this praise abated as the United States entered WWII. He took the same course soon afterwards with four other papers, two of which On the quantity of acids, bases and salts in different varieties of salts and On a new and easy method of analysing sugar, contain his discovery, regarded by him as second in importance only to the atomic theory, that certain anhydrates, when dissolved in water, cause no increase in its volume, his inference being that the salt enters into the pores of the water. His writings continue to be used as propaganda by various groups, often appearing on anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi websites. In 1840 a paper on the phosphates and arsenates, often regarded as a weaker work, was refused by the Royal Society, and he was so incensed that he published it himself. Some claim that Ford neither wrote nor signed this letter and have questioned the sincerity of his apology.

In one of them, read in 1814, he explains the principles of volumetric analysis, in which he was one of the earliest workers. On January 7, 1942, Henry Ford wrote a public letter to the ADL denouncing hatred against the Jews and expressing his hope that anti-Jewish hatred would cease for all time. Of these the earlier are the most important. He later retracted the International Jew and the Protocols. Dalton was president of the Lit & Phil from 1817 until his death, contributing 116 memoirs. Lawsuits in response to anti-Semitic remarks led Ford to close the Dearborn Independent in December 1927. never appeared. None of this work was actually penned by Ford, though they required his tacit approval since he was the paper's publisher.

ii. Denounced by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), the articles nevertheless explicitly condemned pogroms and violence against Jews (Volume 4, Chapter 80), preferring to blame incidents of mass violence on the Jews themselves. The second part of vol. The Independent also published, in Ford's name, several anti-Jewish articles which were released in the early 1920s as a set of four bound volumes, cumulatively titled "The International Jew, the World's Foremost Problem." These volumes were distributed through Ford's car dealerships. This delay is not explained by any excess of care in preparation, for much of the matter was out of date and the appendix giving the author's latest views is the only portion of special interest. The American Jewish Historical Society describes the ideas presented in it as "anti-immigrant, anti-labor, anti-liquor, and anti-Semitic". The second part of this volume appeared in 1810, but the first part of the second volume was not issued till 1827, though the printing of it began in 1817. The paper ran for eight years, during which it republished "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," which has since been discredited by virtually all historians as a forgery.

Dalton communicated his atomic theory to Thomson who, by consent, included an outline of it in the third edition of his System of Chemistry (1807), and Dalton gave a further account of it in the first part of the first volume of his New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808). Henry Ford began publication of a newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, in 1919. However, he was the first to put the ideas into a universal atomic theory, which was undoubtedly his greatest achievement. Under pressure from Edsel and his wife, Clara, Henry Ford finally agreed to collective bargaining at Ford plants, and the first contract with the UAW was signed in June 1941. Many of Dalton's ideas were acquired from other chemists at the time, such as Antoine Lavoisier and William Higgins. A sit-down strike by the UAW union on April 2, 1941 closed the River Rouge Plant. It may be noted that in a paper on the proportion of the gases or elastic fluids constituting the atmosphere, read by him in November 1802, the law of multiple proportions appears to be anticipated in the words: The elements of oxygen may combine with a certain portion of nitrous gas or with twice that portion, but with no intermediate quantity, but there is reason to suspect that this sentence was added some time after the reading of the paper, which was not published till 1805. Ford was the last Detroit automaker to recognize the United Auto Workers union (UAW).

The extension of this idea to substances in general necessarily led him to the law of multiple proportions, and the comparison with experiment brilliantly confirmed his deduction^[3]. The most famous incident, in 1937, was a bloody brawl between company security men and organizers that became known as The Battle of the Overpass. Assisted by the assumption that combination always takes place in the simplest possible way, he thus arrived at the idea that chemical combination takes place between particles of different weights, and this it was which differentiated his theory from the historic speculations of the Greeks. Bennett employed various intimidation tactics to squash union organizing. It appears, then, that confronted with the problem of calculating the relative diameter of the atoms of which, he was convinced, all gases were made, he used the results of chemical analysis. To forestall union activity, he promoted Harry Bennett, a former Navy boxer, to be the head of the Service Department. by chemists of the time. Conversely, Ford was adamantly against labor unions in his plants.

He proceeds to give what has been quoted as his first table of atomic weights, but in his laboratory notebooks^[2] there is an earlier one dated 1803 in which he sets out the relative weights of the atoms of a number of substances, derived from analysis of water, ammonia, carbon dioxide, etc. The "short week," as Ford called it in a contemporary interview, was required so that the country could "absorb its production and stay prosperous.". Here he says:. In granting workers an extra day off, Ford ensured leisure time for the working class. The first published indications of this idea are to be found at the end of his paper on the absorption of gases already mentioned, which was read on October 21, 1803 though not published till 1805. In 1926, Ford instituted the five-day, forty-hour work-week, effectively inventing the modern weekend. However, a study of Dalton's own laboratory notebooks, discovered in the rooms of the Lit & Phil^[1], concluded that so far from Dalton being led to the idea, that chemical combination consists in the interaction of atoms of definite and characteristic weight, by his search for an explanation of the law of multiple proportions, the idea of atomic structure arose in his mind as a purely physical concept, forced upon him by study of the physical properties of the atmosphere and other gases. Even with these requirements a large percentage of workers were able to qualify for the profit sharing.

It has been proposed that this theory was suggested to him either by researches on ethylene (olefiant gas) and methane (carburetted hydrogen) or by analysis of nitrous oxide (protoxide of azote) and nitrogen dioxide (deutoxide of azote), both views resting on the authority of Thomas Thomson. The company established a Sociological Department complete with 150 investigators and support staff in order to verify this last point. The most important of all Dalton's investigations are those concerned with the atomic theory in chemistry, with which his name is inseparably associated. The wage was offered to men over the age of 22, who had worked at the company for 6 months or more, and, importantly, conducted their lives in a manner of which Ford approved. In the two or three years following the reading of these essays, he published several papers on similar topics, that on the absorption of gases by water and other liquids (1803), containing his law of partial pressures. Ford labeled the increased compensation as profit sharing rather than wages. He thus enunciated Gay-Lussac's law, stated some months later by Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac. The program called for a reduction in length of the workday from 9 to 8 hours and a raise in minimum daily pay from $2.34 to $5 for qualifying workers.

In the fourth essay he remarks,. On January 5, 1914 Ford announced his five-dollar a day program. After describing experiments to ascertain the pressure of steam at various points between 0 ° and 100°C (32° and 212°F), he concluded from observations on the vapour pressure of six different liquids, that the variation of vapour pressure for all liquids is equivalent, for the same variation of temperature, reckoning from vapour of any given pressure. Henry Ford had very specific thoughts on relations with his employees. The second of these essays opens with the striking remark,. By 1945 Henry Ford's senility was quite evident, and his wife and daughter-in-law forced his resignation in favor of his grandson, Henry Ford II. In 1800 he became a secretary of the Lit & Phil, and in the following year he presented the important paper or series of papers, entitled Experimental Essays on the constitution of mixed gases; on the pressure of steam and other vapours at different temperatures, both in a vacuum and in air; on evaporation; and on the thermal expansion of gases. Roosevelt considered a federal bailout for Ford Motor Company so that wartime production could continue.

This paper was followed by many others on diverse topics on rain and dew and the origin of springs, on heat, the colour of the sky, steam, the auxiliary verbs and participles of the English language and the reflection and refraction of light. President Franklin D. After that the orange, yellow and green seem one colour which descends pretty uniformly from an intense to a rare yellow, making what I should call different shades of yellow. The company saw hard times during the next two years, losing $10 million a month. Besides the blue and purple of the spectrum he was able to recognize only one colour, yellow, or, as he says in his paper, that part of the image which others call red appears to me little more than a shade or defect of light. Henry Ford II was released from the navy and became an executive vice president, while Harry Bennett had a seat on the board and was responsible for personnel, labor relations, and public relations. In 1794 he was elected a member of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, the Lit & Phil, and a few weeks after election he communicated his first paper on Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours, in which he gave the earliest account of the optical peculiarity known as Daltonism or colour blindness, and summed up its characteristics as observed in himself and others, including his brother. The issue was settled for a period when Henry himself, at the age of 79, took over the presidency personally.