Canton, John

John Canton, (born July 31, 1718, Stroud, Gloucestershire, Eng.—died March 22, 1772, London), British physicist and teacher.

The son of a weaver, Canton became the clerk to the master of a school in London in 1737; he succeeded the master as teacher in 1745 and ran the school himself until his death in 1772. Canton’s invention of a new way to make artificial magnets helped procure him the Copley Medal (1751) and a fellowship in the Royal Society. He was the first in England to experimentally verify Benjamin Franklin’s hypothesis of the identity of lightning and electricity (1752). He then made several important discoveries about electrostatic induction. He was the first to refute the Florentine Academy’s dictum that water is incompressible. He also discovered (1768) the phosphorescent material that became known as Canton’s phosphorus.