Eunice Newton Foote (July 17, 1819 – September 30, 1888) was an American scientist, inventor, and women’s rights campaigner from Seneca Falls, New York. She was the first to suggest that changing the proportion of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would change its temperature, in her paper ‘Circumstances affecting the heat of the sun’s rays’ at the American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in 1856. Because women were not yet allowed to present papers to the Association at that time, Professor Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution spoke on her behalf. In the process, although her experiments did not clearly differentiate between the effect of incident solar radiation and that of long-wave infrared, she detected the root cause of what we now call the greenhouse effect.

Early life

Foote was born in 1819 in Goshen, Connecticut but grew up in Troy, New York. Her father was Isaac Newton Jr., originally of Goshen, Connecticut and later a farmer in East Bloomfield, New York and her mother was Thirza. She had six sisters and five brothers.

Eunice attended the Troy Female Seminary, later re-named the Emma Willard School, from 1836-1838. Students at the seminary were permitted to attend a nearby science college, which was where Foote learned foundational chemistry and biology. There she was influenced by the textbooks of Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, Emma Willard’s sister, who was a female pioneer of women in science, botany expert and third female member of the AAAS.

Career

As a member of the editorial committee for the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first women’s rights convention, Foote was one of the signatories of the convention’s Declaration of Sentiments. She signed with her husband Elisha and was one of five women who prepared the proceedings for publication. Foote was a neighbor and friend of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Research

Foote conducted a series of experiments that demonstrated the interactions of the sun’s rays on different gases. She used an air pump, four thermometers, and two glass cylinders. First she placed two thermometers in each cylinder, then by using the air pump, she evacuated the air from one cylinder and compressed it in the other. Allowing both cylinders to reach the same temperature, she placed the cylinders in the sunlight to measure temperature variance once heated and under different moisture conditions. She performed this experiment on CO
2, common air, and hydrogen. Of the gases she tested, Foote concluded that carbonic acid (CO
2) trapped the most heat, reaching a temperature of 125 °F (52 °C). Looking to the history of the Earth, Foote theorized 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.”

Foote illustrated her findings in a paper entitled ‘Circumstances affecting the heat of sun’s rays’, which was accepted at the 8th annual American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting on August 23, 1856. It is not clear why Foote did not present her own work at the conference, as women were in principle allowed to speak, but it was given instead by Prof. John Henry of the Smithsonian Institution. Before reading Foote’s work, Henry introduced the findings by stating ‘Science was of no country and of no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true’. Foote’s paper was published later the same year under her own name in the American Journal of Arts and Science.

Three years later, John Tyndall reported his own results investigating how various gases trapped infrared thermal radiation, and this was published by the Proceedings of the Royal Society, where he was a fellow. “We know nothing of the effect even of air upon heat radiated from terrestrial sources….With regard to the action of other gases upon heat, we are not, so far as I am aware, possessed of a single experiment,” apparently unaware of Foote’s previous experiments on the gases trapping sunlight. Tyndall has been largely credited as performing the foundational work on the greenhouse effect and climate change science.

Foote also worked on electrical excitation of gases, published in the Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in August 1857, and received a patent in 1860 for “filling for soles of boots and shoes”.

Publications

Circumstances affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays (1856 by Saratoga Springs, New York).

A symposium about her work, ‘Science Knows No Gender: In Search of Eunice Foote Who 162 Years Ago Discovered the Principal Cause of Global Warming’ was held May 2018 at University of California Santa Barbara, USA.

Recognition

In 2010, retired petroleum geologist Ray Sorenson came across Foote’s work in a 1857 volume of Annual Scientific Discovery. He quickly realized that Foote was the first to make the connection between carbon dioxide and climate change and that her work had gone unrecognized. In January 2011, Sorenson published his findings on Foote in AAPG Search and Discovery, where it received ‘more response than any of his other work’. In 2018, a symposium at University of California, Santa Barbara recognized Foote’s contribution to climate science and her erasure from the history of the field.

Since Foote’s work entered the public sphere, there has been much debate over whether Tyndall deliberately used Foote’s work without due credit or whether it was just coincidental timing.

Personal life

On August 12, 1841, she married Elisha Foote, a judge, statistician and inventor in East Bloomfield. Elisha and Eunice lived in Seneca Falls on North Park Street, and later moved to Saratoga, New York. Eunice was described as “a fine portrait and landscape painter”. They were the parents of:

• Mary Foote (1842–1931), an artist and writer who married U.S. Senator from Missouri John B. Henderson
• Augusta Newton Foote (1844-1904), a writer who wrote The Sea at Ebb Tide and was a trustee of Barnard College. She married Francis B. Arnold on March 6, 1869.

Eunice and Elisha had six grandchildren, three by each daughter.

Eunice is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY

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