John Dalton was born on September 6, 1766 in Eaglesfield, Cumberland, England. His father was a Quaker who made a living off being a weaver. When Dalton was only twelve years old he began his teaching career within his own hometown. Two years later, Dalton and his brother taught together at a school in Kendal. Dalton taught for twelve years at this school. After Kendal he was offered a job as a teacher of mathematics and natural philosophy at New College in Manchester. He taught for twenty years before moving on to become the secretary of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society. While being secretary of the society he began to privately tutor kids in the subject of chemistry. In 1817 he was elected president of the Philosophical Society a position of which he held for many years.
While Dalton was teaching in Manchester, he began his first scientific experiments. In 1787 he started to keep a journal as recommended by a fellow Quaker instrument maker. He kept this journal until the day he died which resulted in over 20,000 entries of meteorological observations. In writing his journal, he had written his own book and it became published with the name of "Meteorological Observations and Essays." It was around 1788 he began observations on the aurora phenomena. His ideas were not formed on the basis of others ideas. He concluded that the colors displayed in the sky are caused by electrical disturbances in the atmosphere, and that there must be some relationship between the aurora beams and the Earth's magnetism. He was also interested in the topics such as the barometer, the thermometer, and formation of clouds, hygrometer, and rainfall, formation of clouds, and lastly the evaporation and distribution and character of atmospheric moisture. .
John Dalton is probably as well known for his work and study of color blindness as he is for his atomic theory. Color blindness, a condition that both he and his brother both had (I also suffer from color blindness).