Gardner Quincy Colton was an American anesthetist and lecturer. He was the founder of the Colton Dental Association.
Background
Gardner Quincy Colton was born on February 07, 1814 in Georgia, Vermont, United States. He was the tenth son and twelfth child of Walter and Thankful (Cobb) Colton. The father, a poverty-stricken weaver of Georgia, Vermont, was descended from George Colton, who came from England about 1650 and settled in Springfield, Massachusetts, and from his son Captain Thomas Colton, the Indian fighter.
Education
Colton received a scanty education and, at sixteen, he was apprenticed for five years to a chairmaker of St. Albans, Vermont, at five dollars a year, after which he went to New York City as journeyman maker of cane- seated chairs. With his brother’s financial assistance he later in 1842 studied medicine under Dr. Willard Parker of New York but did not take a degree.
Career
During his studies Colton learned of the exhilarating effects of nitrous oxide inhalation, and in 1844, with borrowed money, he gave in New York a public demonstration of its effects at which the gate receipts were $535. With this encouragement he set out to give demonstrations in other cities. On December 10, 1844, at Hartford, Connecticut, a similar demonstration aroused the interest of a dentist, Horace Wells, who, after Colton had extracted one of his teeth “under” nitrous oxide, used tire anaesthetic in his dental practise and thus became one of the claimants in the subsequent controversy on anaesthesia. Colton always gave Wells the credit of first suggesting the practical use of nitrous oxide. He gave many other public demonstrations, and in 1863, lectured again in New Haven. On this occasion Dr. J. H. Smith, a dentist, became interested, and together he and Colton extracted 1, 785 teeth in twenty-three days, with the use of nitrous oxide.
Colton then removed to New York in July 1863, where he established, with John Allen, the “Colton Dental Association, ” which had for its sole object painless extraction of teeth under nitrous oxide. No records were kept during the first six months, but from February 4, 1864, to January 1, 1867, 17, 601 individuals registered, and two or three teeth were extracted from each. In 1866 branch associations were opened in Philadelphia, Baltimore, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Brooklyn, and Boston.
While lecturing on the telegraph for its inventor, S. F. B. Morse Colton devised an electric motor which was exhibited at Pittsburgh in 1847. The model is fully described in G. B. Prescott’s Dynamo-Electricity (1885) and is now preserved in the Smithsonian Institution but it was never patented. Though the idea of using electricity for propulsion was probably original with Colton, it was not new, for Thomas Davenport had patented an electric railway motor in 1837.
In February 1849 Colton joined his brother in the gold fields of California and for a few months practised medicine there. Later lie was appointed by Governor Riley justice of the peace at San Francisco. He accumulated a small fortune while in California, but on his return to the East he soon lost it by a bad investment and had to support himself by reporting sermons for the Boston Transcript. In 1860 he published a series of war maps, which bore his name. He died in Rotterdam, Netherlands.