Episode Details

John Dalton was a color-blind Quaker schoolteacher who proposed the first scientific atomic theory, systematically catalogued the weather for fifty-seven years straight, and left instructions for his eyeballs to be dissected after death to study his color blindness. The preserved eyes sit in a Manchester museum to this day — and DNA analysis in the 1990s confirmed his self-diagnosis was correct.

This episode traces Dalton from his humble Quaker origins through the atomic theory that transformed chemistry, his obsessive weather observations, and the posthumous eye dissection that proved he understood his own condition better than any doctor of his era.

• Dalton's Quaker schoolteacher origins and his self-taught path into science
• The atomic theory — the first systematic proposal that matter consists of indivisible atoms
• Fifty-seven years of daily weather observations and the founding of modern meteorology
• The preserved eyeballs, the 1990s DNA analysis, and Dalton's remarkably accurate self-diagnosis