The 18th-Century Quaker Farmboy Who Laid the Groundwork for Atomic Theory

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How did we discover atoms? The scientific community had only begun to take it seriously in the 18th century thanks to the experiments of farmboy-turned-scientist John Dalton. Since his youth, he had been enamoured by weather, leading to his experiment on water vapor absorption by air. After finding that water vapor and air seemed to repel each other, he speculated that it could be that atoms only exerted forces on “atoms of their same kind”, laying the groundwork for atomic theory.
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