The Woman Who Warmed the World

In 1856, Eunice Newton Foote took two glass cylinders, an air pump, and four thermometers, set them in the sun, and discovered something no one had ever documented: carbon dioxide traps heat. She wrote it up in a short, precise paper and concluded, flatly, that an atmosphere rich in that gas "would give to our earth a high temperature."

Three years later, John Tyndall published similar findings with fancier equipment. He became the father of climate science. Foote's paper vanished.

This was a woman who had signed the Declaration of Sentiments at Seneca Falls in 1848 — one of the founding documents of the American women's rights movement. But when her paper was presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, it was read aloud by a man, because that was the rule.

Then history did what history does. Her name dropped out of the literature entirely. For 154 years, no one mentioned it.

In 2010, a petroleum geologist named Ray Sorenson was digging through old scientific papers and found Foote's. He almost moved past it. The author's name meant nothing to him. But something in the presentation notes caught his eye — an odd little phrase explaining that the experiments had been conducted "by a lady."

He kept reading.