Another Greek intellectual, Democritus, disagreed with Aristotle. He believed that matter could be divided until you reached the smallest particle (which became known as an atom, from the Greek ‘atomos’, meaning indivisible). Aristotle was convincing and did more experiments than Democritus’s so his theory was more widely accepted.
People continued to believe Aristotle for the next two thousand years until the Englishman John Dalton (1766 - 1844) came along and disproved his theory in the early 1800’s. Dalton had a fascination for gases and meteorology. His research in those fields finally lead him to formulate a theory that stated everything was made of individual particles. Using Democritus’s word for these particles he called them atoms.