Eunice Newton Foote (July 17, 1819 – September 30, 1888) was an American scientist, inventor, and women's rights activist. She discovered the greenhouse effect through finding the connection between rising CO2 levels and the warming of the Earth's atmosphere, and is the first person to recognize its significance in climate change.
Biography[]
Eunice Newton was born in Goshen, Connecticut in 1819 and grew up in New York. She was a distant relative of Isaac Newton. She was educated the Troy Female Seminary and later the Rensselaer School. In 1841, Newton married Elisha Foote Jr., a lawyer. In addition to her studies in science, Foote campaigned for women's rights. She attended the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was a neighbor and friend of hers.
In 1856, Foote conducted a series of experiments in which she filled glass bell jars with different gases (water vapor, carbon dioxide and air) and exposed them to sunlight, from which she found carbonic acid gas (known today as carbon dioxide) to have the highest heating effect. This further led to her discovery that certain gases, such as carbon dioxide, had the ability to absorb heat from the sun and lead to an increase in the temperature of Earth's atmosphere, thereby helping to establishing the cause of global warming and climate change.
Foote's paper reporting her findings was presented at the 1856 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She published a second paper on how the air's varying moisture content affects the amount of static electricity that could be generated. Her significant contributions to climate science, however, was not recognized by scientists at the time due to gender inequality and were largely forgotten for almost a 100 years, until they were rediscovered in the 20th century. The discovery of the greenhouse effect has often been credited to Irish physicist John Tyndall, who published similar findings in climate science in 1859.