JOHN

See also:

• CANTON
• CANTON (borrowed from the Ital. cantone, a corner or angle)
• CANTON (more correctly KWANG-CHOW Fu)
• JOHN CANTON (1718-1772)

CANTON (1718-1772)  , English natural philosopher, was born at Stroud, Gloucestershire, on the 31st of July 1718 . At the age of nineteen, he was articled for five years as clerk to the master of a school in Spital Square, London, with whom at the end of that time he entered into partnership . In 1750 he read a paper before the Royal Society on a method of making artificial magnets, which procured him election as a fellow of the society and the award of the Copley medal . He was the first in England to verify Benjamin Franklin's hypothesis of the identity of lightning and electricity, and he made several import- ant electrical discoveries . In 1762 and 1764 he published experiments in refutation of the decision of the Florentine Academy, at that time generally accepted, that water is incompressible; and in 1768 he described the preparation, by calcining oyster-shell with sulphur, of the phosphorescent material known as Canton's phosphorus . His investigations were carried on without any intermission of his work as a schoolmaster . He died in London on the 22nd of March 1772 .