Vox Meditantis

Eunice Newton Foote should be a household name. Her groundbreaking experiments in 1856 demonstrated that carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere, laying the foundation for our understanding of climate change. Instead, she remains largely unknown whilst John Tyndall, who conducted similar experiments three years later, is celebrated as the father of climate science.

This is not merely about setting the historical record straight—though that matters enormously. It’s about recognising that some of our most fundamental scientific breakthroughs came from a woman who was systematically excluded from presenting her own research, denied membership in scientific institutions, and ignored by the very establishment that should have championed her discoveries.

A Woman Ahead of Her Time

Born in Connecticut in 1819, Eunice Newton grew up during a period of profound social change. Her parents, Isaac Newton Jr. (a distant relative of the famous physicist) and Thirza Newton, held the radical belief that all their children—regardless of gender—deserved a proper education. When Eunice was young, the family moved to a farm near East Bloomfield in western New York, placing her at the centre of America’s most progressive social movements.

At seventeen, Eunice enrolled at Troy Female Seminary, one of the first institutions to offer women scientific education. This was no ordinary finishing school. The seminary’s students were permitted to attend science lectures at the nearby Rensselaer School (now Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute), where they learned chemistry and biology through hands-on experimentation—a revolutionary approach for the time.

The man behind this educational innovation was Amos Eaton, a character whose own story reads like fiction. Eaton had been sentenced to life in prison for fraud but was released after four years so he could pursue his “life calling as an evangelist of scientific education”. Perhaps because he was an outsider himself, Eaton believed passionately that men and women should have equal access to education in the sciences—a “wild idea” in the early nineteenth century.

Under Eaton’s influence, the Troy Female Seminary established the first comprehensive science curriculum for women, one that was “equal to or better than any offered to men”. Eaton oversaw the construction of chemistry laboratories at both schools—the first in the world built solely for students. It was here that Eunice developed the experimental scientific skills that would later enable her to make history.

A Life of Dual Purpose

In 1841, at age twenty, Eunice married Elisha Foote, a judge and fellow inventor who shared her passion for science and progressive causes. The marriage appears to have been a partnership of equals—rare for the era. Elisha supported his wife’s scientific pursuits and feminist activism, even co-signing the Declaration of Sentiments at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention.

The Seneca Falls Convention was the first gathering in the United States devoted exclusively to women’s rights. Eunice was not merely an attendee—she was the fifth person to sign the Declaration of Sentiments and served on the editorial committee responsible for preparing the proceedings for publication. The Declaration demanded radical changes: equal legal rights for women, including the revolutionary idea that women should have the right to vote.

This dual commitment to science and social justice defined Eunice’s character. She understood that the fight for women’s equality extended beyond the ballot box to the laboratory, the lecture hall, and the scientific journal. Her activism informed her science, and her scientific work reinforced her conviction that women’s intellectual capabilities were equal to men’s.

The Experiment That Changed Everything

By the 1850s, Eunice had set up a laboratory in her home, conducting experiments with equipment she designed herself. She was particularly interested in how different gases interacted with the sun’s heat—a question that only a handful of scientists, including Joseph Fourier, had explored theoretically.

Her experimental method was elegantly simple yet profoundly effective. Using four thermometers, two identical glass cylinders, and an air pump, she filled the cylinders with different gases: common air, oxygen, hydrogen, and “carbonic acid gas” (carbon dioxide)8. Each cylinder was four inches in diameter and thirty inches long, with thermometers placed inside to measure temperature changes.

Foote placed the cylinders in sunlight and carefully observed what happened. The results were striking: “The highest effect of the sun’s rays I have found to be in carbonic acid gas,” she wrote. The cylinder containing carbon dioxide not only heated up much more than the others but also retained its heat far longer when removed from the sun.

Her temperature measurements were precise: hydrogen gas reached 104°F/40°C, common air 106°F/41°C, oxygen 108°F/42°C, and carbon dioxide 125°F/52°C. But Foote’s genius lay not just in collecting data but in understanding its implications. She concluded that “an atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature; and if as some suppose, at one period of its history the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its own action as well as from increased weight must have necessarily resulted”.

This was the first published statement linking carbon dioxide concentrations to global temperature—the fundamental principle underlying modern climate science. Foote had discovered the greenhouse effect and hypothesised about past climate change with remarkable prescience.

The Presentation That Wasn’t

On 23rd August 1856, Eunice sat in the audience at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Albany, New York, listening to a man present her own revolutionary findings. Professor Joseph Henry, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, read her paper aloud to the assembled scientists whilst she remained silent in the crowd.

Henry prefaced the presentation with what he perhaps considered progressive sentiment: “Science is of no country and of no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true”. Yet his words ring hollow when we consider that Eunice was not permitted to speak for herself, despite women being technically allowed to present at the conference.

The irony is devastating. Here was groundbreaking research that would fundamentally reshape our understanding of Earth’s climate system, being presented by a man who failed to grasp its significance. Henry later wrote that although the experiments were “interesting and valuable,” there were “many difficulties encompassing any attempt to interpret their significance”.

The scientific establishment’s response was underwhelming. Despite coverage in Scientific American, the New York Daily Tribune, and other publications, Foote’s work generated little discussion. Her paper was published in The American Journal of Science and Arts in September 1856, but it was largely ignored. The opportunity to recognise a transformative discovery slipped away, lost to the institutional blindness of a scientific community that couldn’t see genius when it came from a woman.

The Man Who Got the Credit

Three years later, in 1859, Irish physicist John Tyndall conducted his own experiments on the heat-absorbing properties of gases. His work was more sophisticated than Foote’s, using advanced spectroscopic techniques to measure the absorption of infrared radiation specifically. Tyndall’s experiments were indeed groundbreaking, but they built upon principles that Foote had already established.

The crucial question is whether Tyndall knew of Foote’s work. Research by Roland Jackson suggests he probably didn’t. “Direct communication about science across the Atlantic was sparse in the 1850s,” Jackson notes, “and, as American scientific institutions carried relatively little weight in Europe, personal relationships were particularly important”. An amateur American woman scientist had no such connections.

Yet Tyndall’s ignorance of Foote’s work itself reflects the systemic barriers that kept women’s contributions invisible. Had Foote been a man, had she been permitted to present her own research, had she been a member of scientific societies, her work would likely have reached European scientists. The exclusion wasn’t accidental—it was structural.

Lost to History, Found by Serendipity

For over 150 years, Eunice Foote’s contributions remained buried in scientific obscurity. Her work might have stayed forgotten if not for the serendipitous discovery by Raymond Sorenson, a retired petroleum geologist and amateur historian, in 2011.

Sorenson was browsing through his collection of 300 pre-Civil War scientific books when he stumbled upon a reference to Foote’s work in The Annual of Scientific Discovery. “It was purely blind luck,” Sorenson recalls. “I happened to read that page and knew enough to think, ‘Ah, that doesn’t fit with my understanding of the history of that concept’”.

His discovery sparked a revolution in our understanding of climate science history. Researchers began re-examining Foote’s work, recognising its significance, and questioning why it had been overlooked for so long. The answer, of course, lies in the systematic exclusion of women from scientific recognition.

The Barriers She Faced

Foote’s marginalisation reflects the triple burden identified by researcher John Perlin: “She was female. She was an amateur. And she was an American”. Each of these characteristics worked against her in different ways.

As a woman, she faced explicit exclusion from scientific institutions. The American Association for the Advancement of Science didn’t allow women to be full members until much later. She couldn’t attend universities, join professional societies, or participate in the formal networks that shaped scientific discourse.

As an “amateur” scientist, she lacked the institutional affiliation that would have given her work credibility. But this label is itself problematic—Foote had excellent scientific training and conducted rigorous experiments. The dismissal of “amateur” work often reflects class and gender biases rather than scientific merit.

As an American, her work was viewed with suspicion by European scientists who dominated the field. American science was considered second-rate, and discoveries made in America were often overlooked by European institutions.

Beyond the Laboratory

Eunice Foote’s life exemplifies the interconnection between scientific progress and social justice. Her commitment to women’s rights wasn’t separate from her scientific work—it was integral to it. She understood that expanding women’s opportunities in science required challenging fundamental assumptions about women’s capabilities and rightful place in society.

After her groundbreaking climate research, Foote continued experimenting and published a second paper in 1857 on static electricity in atmospheric gases. She also held several patents for inventions, demonstrating her practical as well as theoretical scientific abilities.

She remained active in the women’s rights movement throughout her life, though details of her later activism are scarce—another indication of how women’s contributions were systematically under-documented. Foote died in 1888, never knowing that her climate research would one day be recognised as foundational to one of the most important scientific challenges of the modern era.

The Modern Recognition

In recent years, there has been growing recognition of Foote’s contributions. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration celebrated her 200th birthday in 2019, calling her a “hidden climate science pioneer” whose “experiments foreshadowed the discovery of Earth’s greenhouse effect”. Google featured her in a Doodle, and scientific institutions have begun incorporating her story into their histories of climate science.

Yet this recognition comes with urgency. As climate change accelerates and the greenhouse effect discovered by Foote drives unprecedented global warming, her prescient warning becomes more relevant than ever. Her 1856 observation that “an atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature” now reads like a prophecy of our current climate crisis.

A Legacy of Courage and Discovery

Eunice Newton Foote’s story is both inspiring and infuriating. She possessed the intellectual courage to pursue groundbreaking research despite social barriers, the scientific skill to conduct experiments that revealed fundamental truths about our planet’s climate system, and the moral conviction to fight for women’s equality in an era when such ideas were considered radical.

Her legacy challenges us to examine how scientific knowledge is created, validated, and remembered. It reminds us that breakthrough discoveries can come from unexpected places—from amateur scientists, from excluded voices, from those whom the establishment overlooks.

Most importantly, Foote’s story demonstrates that the fight for scientific truth and the fight for social justice are inseparable. The same systems that excluded women from presenting their research also impoverished our understanding of the natural world. When we deny people the opportunity to contribute based on their gender, race, class, or other characteristics, we don’t just harm individuals—we harm the entire scientific enterprise.

As we face the climate crisis that Foote’s experiments helped predict, we must remember that our greatest scientific challenges require the full participation of all talented minds. The greenhouse effect was discovered by a woman who wasn’t allowed to present her own work. Imagine what other discoveries we might have missed—and what solutions we might be missing now—when we fail to include everyone in the scientific conversation.

Eunice Newton Foote deserves recognition not just as a historical curiosity but as a founding figure of climate science whose work remains strikingly relevant to our modern predicament. Her experiments revealed fundamental truths about our planet’s climate system, her activism advanced the cause of equality, and her life demonstrates the power of intellectual courage in the face of systematic exclusion.

The next time someone mentions the greenhouse effect or discusses climate change, remember Eunice Foote—the woman who saw it coming more than 165 years ago, and who had the scientific brilliance and moral courage to sound the alarm, even when the world wasn’t ready to listen.

Bob Lynn | © 2025 Vox Meditantis. All rights reserved.