Why was color blindness once called Daltonism?

Color blindness was once commonly referred to as Daltonism because the British scientist John Dalton was the first to provide a scientific description of the condition.

In 1794, Dalton published a paper detailing his own inability to distinguish certain colors, a condition he discovered when he realized that the colors he perceived in the spectrum differed from those seen by others. Because he was the first to document this visual deficiency in a formal, scientific manner, the term "Daltonism" became associated with color blindness, particularly in reference to red-green color vision deficiencies.1