The Woman Who Discovered Climate Change from Her Seat

In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote filled glass cylinders with different gases, placed thermometers inside them, and set them in the sun. The cylinder filled with carbon dioxide got hotter than the others and stayed hot far longer. She wrote it up plainly: an atmosphere heavy with CO₂ would give the Earth a higher temperature. It was the first time anyone had demonstrated the greenhouse effect.

Three years later, the Irish physicist John Tyndall published similar findings with more sophisticated equipment. He became the father of climate science. Foote became a footnote — and then not even that.

The details are almost too neat. Foote was no amateur dabbler. She had signed the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls in 1848, standing alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton to demand that women be treated as full human beings. Eight years later, she produced a discovery that would define the central crisis of the coming centuries. And when it was time to present her paper, Professor Joseph Henry introduced it by noting that science was "of no country and of no sex."

Then the association's own rules prevented her from reading it aloud, because she was a woman.

So she sat in the audience and listened to a man explain her work to a room full of men, who then forgot about it for a hundred and fifty-four years.