John Dalton, by Thomas Phillips (1770-1845). Photo: Via Wikimedia Commons.
Eye - 31 January 2025
ye discovers the scandalous scarlet stockings that prompted a scientific revelation, and hears about historical minutes on the ministry of sleep
Scandalous stockings
Eye spied some friendly hosiery in a recent episode of QI XL (https://bbc.in/4fUkYug).
In the ‘Visual’ episode, the unusual circumstances of a scientific discovery by John Dalton were revealed. He was a chemist, physicist, meteorologist and Quaker, whose work on atomic theory earned him one of the first Royal Medals in 1826. He also researched colour blindness.
Sandi Toksvig shared that: ‘He bought his elderly mother a pair of stockings for her birthday… he didn’t realise that they were scarlet. He was a devout Quaker, as indeed was his mother, and she had to dress soberly… it caused a scandal. He thought they were blue.’
Eye discovered that The Royal Society’s ‘Celebrating scientists with disabilities’ series included an article about John Dalton’s extraordinary life.
Born in 1766, he received little formal education but ‘his sharp mind and natural sense of curiosity’ compensated for this and when he was just twelve ‘he joined his older brother in running a local Quaker school’.
In 1793 he published a meteorological paper and wanted to study further, ‘but as a Quaker was barred from most British universities at the time’. His mentor, classics scholar John Gough, ‘pulled a few strings and got him a place as a tutor at Manchester College’.
In a letter written around the time he arrived in Manchester, John noted: ‘I am at present engaged in a very curious investigation. I discovered last summer with certainty, that colours appear different to me to what they do to others… my brother excepted, who seems to see as I do.’ Now we know the role his mother’s stockings played!
He produced a paper in 1798, proposing that his perception of colours ‘was the result of his vitreous humour… possessing an abnormal blue tint, thus acting as a filter for certain wavelengths of light’. He asked that, upon his death, his eyes be examined to determine if this was true.
In 1844 this was done and showed their contents were ‘perfectly colourless’. 151 years later, in 1995, ‘scientists conducted a DNA analysis of his preserved eyeball… it was revealed he had what is known today as red-green colour blindness, or deuteranopia: a rare form of the condition caused by a missing gene for the receptor sensitive to medium wavelength (green) light’.
The ‘ministry of sleep’
Meg Hill, of Kendal & Sedbergh Area Meeting, writes: ‘Some time ago, I came across two old Minutes about sleeping in Meeting, and then read Anthony Wilson’s piece [13 December 2024]… one of them is from Yealand Meeting in a book about Richard Hubberthorne by Elisabeth Brockbank.
‘The passage reads: “The meeting house was small and somewhat overhung with its gallery, and the meetings would last two to three hours. From time to time, with regular and faithful frequency, a minute such as the following occurs: Thomas Cunningham and Thomas Jackson are appointed to advise, and if possible stir up such Friends to watchfulness as are inclined to be overtaken with sleeping in Meeting.”
‘The second example is from a much earlier time, from a Monthly Meeting at Dolobran, mid-Wales in 4th. month 1705 as follows: “This Meet. desires friends to be faithfull in keeping up their weekday meetings, and to be diligent and faithfull in meetings, and bear a faithfull testimony against Sleeping & Sleepers in meetings. This Meet. also desires that Jane Kelsall and Owen Oliver do warn and advise Sleepers and those Friends that are so inclined to sleep in Meetings, in the Love of God yt [that] such may be more watchfull and diligent for the future.”
‘It is thought that its tone was gently humorous. Not only were Meetings hours long, but many participants would have been up early working in the fields. Nowadays, we speak kindly of “the ministry of sleep” when it occurs, though snoring might get a gentle nudge.’
