Eunice Foote

A few days ago, the United Nations released another climate report that assessed our actions and their effects to meet our goal of reducing our reliance on greenhouse gases. That report did not provide much positive news. Although the threat of dangerous warming of the climate due to human-generated emissions from the burning of fossil fuels has been mainly in the news recently, more than 150 years ago Eunice Foote, an American scientist and women's rights campaigner made a discovery that could have highlighted the harmful effects of greenhouse gases if she had not been ignored.

"If the air had mixed with it a higher proportion of carbon dioxide than at present, an increased temperature" would result - Eunice Foote.

In 1856, Eunice Foote published her study and described the results of her experiment on carbon dioxide in a paper named “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays." Her experiment was brilliant yet simple. She got two glass cylinders and placed a thermometer in both of them. Then, she added carbon dioxide gas into one cylinder while adding air into the other. After leaving the cylinders in the sun for some time, she observed that the cylinder containing carbon dioxide had a higher temperature on the thermometer than the one with just air. Thus, Foote made the discovery that carbon dioxide absorbs heat in the atmosphere.

“Eunice Foote was disadvantaged not only by this lack of an academic community in America and poor communication with Europe, but by two further factors: her gender and her amateur status" - Roland Jackson, a historian and biographer of John Tyndall.

A few years after Foote's study, a scientist in England John Tyndall published a more accurate paper which identified the gases that had this greenhouse effect of absorbing heat. Tyndall's paper "Note on the Transmission of Radiant Heat Through Gaseous Bodies" did not cite Foote's work and, because Foote was not only an amateur scientist in a less respected academic community in the United States, but she was also a woman in a society that did not value her research, Foote was largely overlooked in the scientific community.

However, Foote's contribution to our society today is not confined to only the scientific realm; she was also a prominent feminist. Foote's name is fifth on the list of women and men who signed the famous "Declaration of Rights and Sentiments" that was written at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York in 1848.

Even though Eunice Foote was omitted in the 1850s, that does not mean that she has to continue to be forgotten about. I have attached a link to a short film about Foote below. Learn about and share her story, and think about her the next time you hear about carbon dioxide and climate change.

Link to short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxgAOKzOcBU