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| Eunice Foote was the first scientist to figure out that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could lead to global warming. She did this in 1856. However, a male physicist gets the credit for m making the same discovery, but in 1859. |
This is going on forever. I have yet example.
Way back in 1856, a woman named Eunice Newton Foote started running some scientific experiments. As Tess Joose wrote for the American Physical Society back in 2023:
"She set up 30-inch-long cylinders, each with a thermometer inside, and each filled with different gases and gaseous mixtures - moist air, dry air, carbon dioxide, oxygen and hydrogen.
Foote placed the cylinders in the sun and charted how the gases warmed. The cylinder containing carbon dioxide warmed the most, she noted and stayed at its hight temperature for a long time after she took it out of the sun.'
She had the following to say about carbon dioxide in a paper she wrote: "Atmosphere of that gas would go to our earth a high temperature." In other words, Foote had just discovered climate change.
Foote was an early feminist. In 1841, she'd married a patent lawyer named Elisha Foote, then they moved to Seneca Falls, New York. The couple attended the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 which decried gender inequality and proclaimed alienable rights, accord to abs.
While she was championing women's rights, Foote also set up a home laboratory. She might have been inspired by Joseph Henry, a family friend who was interested in how weather and climate impacted agriculture.
Henry read Foote's results, titled "Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun's Rays," at the 10th annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Albany, New York on August 23, 1856. (It was uncommon for women to read their own work back in the pre-Civil War America).
He paper was excluded from the official conference proceedings.
As is usually the case with smart women who discover things first, Foote was pretty much ignored. Three years after Foote's discoveries. John Tyndall, an Irish physicist, using spiffier equipment than Foote, also determined that carbon dioxide would create a greenhouse effect. Tyndall is now regarded as the father of climate science.
Tyndall was well-educated and highly educated. He had better equipment. He publicized his results. It's 'unclear whether he knew of Foote's work. But, being a man, Tyndall created a much bigger splash than any woman could.
Tyndall published his results.
Evan J. Segal wrote in Substack:
"(Tyndall) credited Joseph Fourier and Claude Pouillet in his opening remarks. He did not mention Eunice. Historians still debate whether he ever knew of her work. What is not in dispute is that Tyndall got the mountains, the institutes, the glaciers and the lunar crater named after him. Eunice got a hundred and fifty years of silence."
We didn't know about Foote until about 15 years ago or so. As Segal tells us, a retired petroleum geologist found a summary of Foote's work in an 1857 volume of The Annual of Scientific Discovery.
The next year, the geologist published a short article about her in the American Association of Petroleum Geologists' journal Search and Discovery, hoping others would see the article and investigate further.
They did. Eventually. Segal continues the chronology:
In December, 2016, Leila McNeill wrote an article about Foote in Smithsonian Magazine. Katherine Hayhoe amplified the story.
NOAA's Annarita Marietta published a letter in Nature on the 200th anniversary of Foote's birth. The New York Times in 2020 added Foote to its Overlooked series, noting that the paper failed to note her death when it happened and failed to notice her work.
So, Foote, did finally get some recognition, though not enough. And too bad she didn't get the recognition she deserved when she was alive.
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