🇺🇸 United States

In 1887, Nellie Bly practiced deranged expressions in a mirror for one night, then got herself committed to a New York asylum. She spent ten days documenting rotten food, ice baths, and patients tied together with ropes. Her exposé triggered a grand jury investigation and forced the city to overhaul its asylum system. The doctors who had unanimously declared her insane never explained how a twenty-three-year-old reporter had fooled them all.

In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote put carbon dioxide in a glass cylinder, set it in the sun, and discovered it traps heat. She wrote it up. Three years later, a man published similar findings with better equipment and became the father of climate science. Her paper was read aloud by a man because women weren't allowed to present. Then her name vanished from the literature entirely — until 2010, when a geologist found her paper and noticed the experiments had been conducted "by a lady."

Eunice Newton Foote filled glass cylinders with different gases and put them in the sun. The one with CO₂ got hotter and stayed hot longer. She'd just demonstrated the greenhouse effect — the first person ever to do so. Three years later, John Tyndall published similar findings and became the father of climate science. Foote sat in the audience at her own presentation, forbidden to speak, and then disappeared from the record for a hundred and fifty-four years.