Atmospheric Science => greenhouse gas effect

Eunice Foot grew up to become a largely forgotten, amateur scientist and inventor, who discovered the greenhouse effect.

Born in 1819 in Connecticut in the US, Foote was raised in New York at the center of social and political movements of her day, such as the abolition of slavery, anti-alcohol activism, and women’s rights.

She attended the Troy Female Seminary and the Rensselaer School from age 17 to age 19, gaining a broad education in scientific theory and practice.

Eunice Newton Foote became the first person on record to link CO2 and global warming. She used basic science experiments to derive at conclusions as noted in her paper “Circumstances affecting the heat of the sun’s rays.” It is the first description of the greenhouse gas effect: the tendency for a closed environment like our atmosphere to heat up when carbon dioxide levels rise.

She presented her research to the Eight Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1856. It was reviewed the following month in the pages of Scientific American, in a column that approved of her “practical experiments” and noted, “this we are happy to say has been done by a lady.”

The review, titled “Scientific Ladies—Experiments with Condensed Gas,” opened with the sentence “Some have not only entertained, but expressed the mean idea, that women do not possess the strength of mind necessary for scientific investigation”

She used an air pump, glass cylinders, and thermometers to compare the effects of sunlight on “carbonic acid gas” (or carbon dioxide) and “common air.” From her rudimentary but effective demonstrations, she concluded:

An atmosphere of that gas [CO2] would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature…must have necessarily resulted.

She was marginalized almost from the start. “Entirely because she was a woman,” an official review of her work points out, “Foote was barred from reading the paper describing her findings.”

Foote’s work was passed over for publication in the Association’s annual Proceedings. Later her paper was recognized as the first known publication in a scientific journal by an American woman in the field of physics.

Her achievement would disappear altogether three years later when Irish physicist John Tyndall, who likely knew nothing of Foote, made the same discovery. With his superior resources and privileges, Tyndall was able to take this research further.

Neither Tyndall nor Foote wrote about the effect of human activity on the contemporary climate. It would take until the 1890s for Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius to predict human-caused warming from industrial CO2 emissions.

Foot, together with her husband, were inventors. Eunice mostly patented her inventions in her husband’s name, because as a married woman, she would not have been able to defend the patents in court. He filed a patent in 1842 on a thermostatically controlled cooking stove which had been invented by Foote. Eunice filed a patent in her own name in 1860 on a shoe and boot insert made of a single piece of vulcanized rubber to “prevent the squeaking of boots and shoes”. In 1864, she filed for a patent on a new cylinder-type paper-making machine.

Foote attended the first Women’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY in 1848, and her name is on the list of signatories to the “Declaration of Sentiments,” a document demanding full equality in social status, legal rights, and educational, economic, and, Foote would have added, scientific opportunities.

Foote died in 1888 at the age of 69.