🇺🇸Eunice Newton Foote
2 oddlets about Eunice Newton Foote
The Woman Who Warmed the World
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."
The Woman Who Discovered Climate Change from Her Seat
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.