Eunice Foote: She Found the Greenhouse Effect First

Posted by by Female Obscura

She proved carbon dioxide traps the sun’s heat in 1856. A man three years later was named the father of climate science.

The basic finding behind climate change was published by an American woman in 1856. She filled glass cylinders with different gases, set them in the sun, and read the thermometers. The one holding carbon dioxide grew hottest and stayed hot the longest.

From that she reasoned something no one had put in print before. More of that gas in the air would make the whole planet warmer. She was not allowed to read the paper to the scientists gathered to hear it, and for the next hundred years the discovery was credited to a man working on the other side of the Atlantic.

Her name was Eunice Newton Foote.

The experiment

Foote was born in Goshen, Connecticut, on July 17, 1819, and raised on a farm in western New York. She studied at the Troy Female Seminary, one of the few schools of its kind in the country, and took chemistry and biology in the laboratories nearby. She was an amateur in the sense the word had then, a natural philosopher without a university post, because no American university would have given a woman one.

Her apparatus was simple. Two glass cylinders, each with a thermometer, each pumped full of a different gas, both left in sunlight. She compared ordinary air against moist air, against dry air, against oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide. The cylinder of carbon dioxide, which she called carbonic acid gas, heated far past the others and cooled slowest of all.

She then made the leap that matters. Writing of that gas, she concluded that “an atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature,” and that if the air had once held a larger share of it, “an increased temperature must have necessarily resulted.” That is the greenhouse principle, stated plainly, from a tabletop experiment, in 1856.

The paper she was not allowed to read

Foote submitted her findings, titled “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays,” to the tenth annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held that August in Albany. She did not present it. Almost no woman did. It was read on her behalf by Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian, who introduced it by saying that “science was of no country and of no sex.”

The gesture had a floor built into it. Henry read the paper because Foote could not, and in the newspaper account of the meeting he added that the results, while interesting, carried difficulties that made their significance hard to interpret. Neither Foote’s paper nor Henry’s reading of it was entered into the association’s published proceedings. The full text appeared instead in the American Journal of Science and Arts that November, printed directly after a paper by her husband, Elisha. It was, apart from work in astronomy, the first known physics paper published by an American woman.

This was not a woman working at the edge of the questions of her day. Seven years earlier she had sat in the Wesleyan Chapel at Seneca Falls and signed the Declaration of Sentiments, the founding document of the American women’s rights movement. Her name is fifth on it. She understood exactly what it meant to be handed a paper to have a man read aloud.

Tyndall, three years later

In 1859 the Irish physicist John Tyndall ran a more sophisticated version of the question, using precision instruments to show that gases such as carbon dioxide and water vapor absorb and radiate heat rather than sunlight. His work was published by the Royal Society, of which he was a fellow. It is careful, quantitative, and genuinely a step past Foote’s, and it made him, in the standard telling, the discoverer of the greenhouse effect and the founder of climate science.

Tyndall credited the Frenchman Claude Pouillet for earlier work on solar radiation. He did not mention Foote. Whether he had read her paper, or read of it and dismissed it, is not known, and honesty requires saying so. Her results were summarized in 1856 and 1857 in journals on both sides of the Atlantic, including one issue that also carried a paper of Tyndall’s, which is why the historian John Perlin has argued Tyndall must have known. The physicist Roland Jackson, who examined the question directly, found no proof either way. The archive does not need him to be a thief. The mechanism here is quieter and more complete than theft.

What was actually taken

Foote made a correct and original discovery, put it in print, and was kept from standing up to explain it. The record then closed over her twice. Her paper was left out of the proceedings that would have fixed her priority in the scientific record. And the credit for the idea attached to a man who worked later, published in a more prestigious venue, and belonged to the institutions she was barred from entering. She did not lose a race. She was never allowed onto the track, and the finish line was moved to another country.

The rest of her life shows the same pattern at smaller scale. She was an inventor, and by her own account she mostly filed her inventions under her husband’s name, because a married woman could not defend a patent in court. In 1868 she told Elizabeth Cady Stanton that she believed half the patents in the office were for inventions by women, taken out by the men who controlled the money and wanted the standing.

Foote died in Lenox, Massachusetts, in 1888. Her carbon dioxide paper sat unread in the history of climate science for well over a century, rediscovered only in the twenty-first, when the question of who first understood that this gas could warm the world stopped being academic.

She measured the warming a hundred and fifty years before the world agreed it was happening. The record can carry her name now. Enter the archive.

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