Women have been making significant contributions to science for centuries and receiving little to no credit for their work. Rosalind Franklin captured the X-ray images of the DNA molecule that allowed James Watson and Francis Crick to decipher its structure.
That kind of recognition isn’t the case for many women scientists who were never given authorship on papers and whose work has been forgotten. One woman who almost fell into that category was American Eunice Newton Foote, an early female climate science pioneer whose name you’ve most likely never heard.
Foote’s experiments in the 1850s demonstrated the ability of atmospheric water vapor and carbon dioxide to affect solar heating, foreshadowing John Tyndall’s later experiments that described the workings of Earth’s greenhouse effect. Despite her remarkable insight into the influence that higher carbon dioxide levels in the past would have had on Earth’s temperature, Foote went unnoticed in the history of climate science until recently.
Foote was an amateur scientist—known as a natural philosopher in that era—who in the 1850s conducted some of the first experiments exploring the influence of different atmospheric gases on the “heat of the sun’s rays.”
Using glass cylinders, each encasing a mercury thermometer, Foote found that the heating effect of the Sun was greater in moist air than dry air, and that it was highest of all in a cylinder containing carbon dioxide. She wrote, “The receiver containing this gas became itself much heated—very sensibly more so than the other—and on being removed [from the Sun], it was many times as long in cooling.”
Her experimental design wasn’t sophisticated enough to reveal how these atmospheric characteristics were able to influence solar heating. Her experiments didn’t demonstrate that water vapor and greenhouse gases raise Earth’s temperature not by absorbing incoming sunlight, but by absorbing heat radiated by the surface. They nevertheless appear to have led Foote to a remarkable insight about carbon dioxide and Earth’s past climate.
Her work was presented on August 23, 1856, at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—not by her, but by a male colleague, the eminent Joseph Henry. Neither Foote’s paper, nor Henry’s presentation of it, were included in the conference proceedings, however.
A short page and a half paper was published in the American Journal of Science and Arts in November 1856, and a summary of her work was published in the 1857 volume of Annual of Scientific Discovery by David A. Wells. Reporting on the annual meeting, Wells wrote:
That kind of recognition isn’t the case for many women scientists who were never given authorship on papers and whose work has been forgotten. One woman who almost fell into that category was American Eunice Newton Foote, an early female climate science pioneer whose name you’ve most likely never heard.
Foote’s experiments in the 1850s demonstrated the ability of atmospheric water vapor and carbon dioxide to affect solar heating, foreshadowing John Tyndall’s later experiments that described the workings of Earth’s greenhouse effect. Despite her remarkable insight into the influence that higher carbon dioxide levels in the past would have had on Earth’s temperature, Foote went unnoticed in the history of climate science until recently.
Foote was an amateur scientist—known as a natural philosopher in that era—who in the 1850s conducted some of the first experiments exploring the influence of different atmospheric gases on the “heat of the sun’s rays.”
Using glass cylinders, each encasing a mercury thermometer, Foote found that the heating effect of the Sun was greater in moist air than dry air, and that it was highest of all in a cylinder containing carbon dioxide. She wrote, “The receiver containing this gas became itself much heated—very sensibly more so than the other—and on being removed [from the Sun], it was many times as long in cooling.”
Her experimental design wasn’t sophisticated enough to reveal how these atmospheric characteristics were able to influence solar heating. Her experiments didn’t demonstrate that water vapor and greenhouse gases raise Earth’s temperature not by absorbing incoming sunlight, but by absorbing heat radiated by the surface. They nevertheless appear to have led Foote to a remarkable insight about carbon dioxide and Earth’s past climate.
Her work was presented on August 23, 1856, at the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)—not by her, but by a male colleague, the eminent Joseph Henry. Neither Foote’s paper, nor Henry’s presentation of it, were included in the conference proceedings, however.
A short page and a half paper was published in the American Journal of Science and Arts in November 1856, and a summary of her work was published in the 1857 volume of Annual of Scientific Discovery by David A. Wells. Reporting on the annual meeting, Wells wrote:
Foote’s work showed that carbon dioxide and water vapor modulated solar heating, and she presented it three years before John Tyndall, whose more sophisticated experiments demonstrated conclusively that Earth’s greenhouse effect comes from water vapor and other gases like carbon dioxide that absorb and emit thermal infrared energy, not visible sunlight. In his publication, Tyndall gave credit to Mathias Pouillet for his work on the passage of solar radiation through the atmosphere, but didn’t mention Foote (Tyndall 1859). Whether he knew of her work or thought it wasn’t relevant isn’t known.
