Biography of John Dalton Dalton, John was born in Eaglesfield, in 1766 and died today 1844. Dalton was a British chemist and physicist, who developed the atomic theory of matter on which modern physical science was founded. He began a series of meteorological observations in 1787 and he continued them for 57 years. Dalton accumulated some 200,000 observations and measurements on the weather in the Manchester area. Dalton's had a big interest in meteorology which led him to study a variety of phenomena as well as the instruments used to measure them. He was the first to prove that rain is precipitated by a decrease in temperature, not by a change in atmospheric pressure.