Charles X. Dalton
1840 - 1912
Charles X. Dalton was born in Philadelphia in 1840 and learned his trade as an expert technician from a German instrument maker in that city. He worked in the factory of Joseph Zentmeyer, the microscope maker. During the Civil War, he served as an army nurse. At the close of the war, he became employed by Robert B. Tolles in Canastota, New York. When Tolles relocated to Boston in 1867 to establish the Boston Optical Works, Dalton followed.
Dalton was entrusted with the making of the metal work for Tolles's microscopes and telescopes, and this work was praised.
After Tolles died in 1883, Dalton carried on the business of the Boston Optical Works in the dingy Hanover Street building, making repairs on Tolles instruments and selling and repairing other optical apparatus. In an advertisement for the Boston Optical Works in 1895, Dalton was listed as "Charles X. Dalton, successor to the late R. B. Tolles." The ad features "Tolles objectives" (most likely the patented solid objectives) and "Tolles celebrated achromatic triplets in silver cases."
In his later years, Dalton made most of the repairs on the microscopes and chemical balances of the Harvard Medical School, MIT, Wellesley College, and most other educational institutions in the Boston area. This line of work even took him as far as Vassar.
A memorial on Dalton published in 1912 in Science described Charles X. Dalton as "a personality familiar not only to a large circle of scientists through the country but to many of Boston's leading business men....Dalton was not a workman for wages only....He would never do mediocre work and was his own severest critic of his product. He made many of his tools and appliances and accomplished much by primitive but cunning methods which are a lost art to the mechanician of to-day."
George W. Rolfe, "Charles X. Dalton," <i>Science</i>, new series, 35, no. 899 (March 1912): 444-446