| John Dalton
was the son of a poor Quaker weaver who, for financial reasons,
was forced to work with crude apparatus. Even so, he was able to
discover several fundamental scientific laws. One of his strongest
interests was in meteorology. His studies of water vapor in air
convinced him that water was not chemically combined with the nitrogen
or oxygen in the air. He also concluded that gases dissolve in
liquids due to a physical process dependent on the weight of the "ultimate
particles" of the gas. This conclusion assumes the existence
of relative masses characteristic of individual gas particles --
or atomic masses,
as we now call them.
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