Eunice Newton Foote biography: The woman who discovered the greenhouse effect

Eunice Newton Foote (July 17, 1819 – September 30, 1888) was an American scientist, inventor, and women’s rights campaigner.

She was the first scientist to conclude that certain gases warmed when exposed to sunlight and that rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels would change atmospheric temperature and could affect climate, a phenomenon now referred to as the Greenhouse effect.

Born in Connecticut, Foote was raised in New York at the center of social and political movements of her day, such as the abolition of slavery, anti-alcohol activism, and women’s rights.

Eunice Newton Foote’s early life

Eunice Newton Foote attended the Troy Female Seminary and the Rensselaer School from age 17-19, gaining a broad education in scientific theory and practice.

After marrying attorney Elisha Foote in 1841, Foote settled in Seneca Falls, New York. She was a signatory to the Declaration of Sentiments and one of the editors of the proceedings of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first gathering to treat women’s rights as its sole focus. In 1856 she published a paper notable for demonstrating heat absorption by CO2 and water vapor and hypothesizing that changing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere would alter the climate.

It was the first known publication in a scientific journal by an American woman in the field of physics. She published a second paper in 1857 on static electricity in atmospheric gases. Although she was not a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), both her papers were read at the organization’s annual conferences—these were the only papers in the field of physics to be written by an American woman until 1889. She went on to patent several inventions.

Foote died in 1888 and for almost a hundred years her contributions were unknown, before being rediscovered by women academics in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, new interest in Foote arose when it was realized that her work predated discoveries made by John Tyndall, who scientists had recognized as the first person to experimentally show the mechanism of the greenhouse effect involving infrared radiation.

Detailed examination of her work by modern scientists has confirmed that three years before Tyndall published his paper in 1859, Foote discovered that water vapor and CO2 absorb heat from sunlight. Furthermore, her view that variances in the atmospheric levels of water vapor and CO2 would result in climate change preceded Tyndall’s 1861 publication by five years.

Because of the limits of her experimental design, and possibly a lack of knowledge of infrared radiation, Foote did not examine or detect the absorption and emission of radiant energy within the thermal infrared range, which is the cause of the greenhouse effect. In 2022, the American Geophysical Union instituted The Eunice Newton Foote Medal for Earth-Life Science in her honor to recognize outstanding scientific research.

Eunice Newton Foote’s education

Eunice Newton was born July 17, 1819, in Goshen, Connecticut, to Thirza and Isaac Newton Jr. By 1820, the family had relocated to Ontario County in western New York. Her father was a farmer and entrepreneur in East Bloomfield, amassing wealth and losing it through speculation.

Eunice was a distant relative of the scientist Isaac Newton. Eunice had six sisters and five brothers, although the oldest sister died at two years old. Her father died in 1835 and the fifth child, a daughter named Amanda, took it upon herself to rid the properties of debt and become sole owner to keep the family farm from being sold.

The area of New York where Eunice grew up and spent most of her life was the era’s center of social activism. She would have been exposed to abolitionists, dress reform activists, mystics, temperance advocates, and women’s rights campaigners.

Sketch of a street scene with people walking on a sidewalk in front of a wrought iron fence. Parallel and behind the fence is a small building to the left connected to an open-front shed across the back and down the right side a large, stone, 4-story building.

Troy Female Seminary, 1822 Sketch of a Colonial Georgian-style building with two chimneys on both opposing sides of the roof. Rensselaer School, 1824 Newton was educated at the Troy Female Seminary, a pioneering women’s preparatory school, established by feminist Emma Willard.

Students of the seminary were encouraged to attend science courses at the adjacent Rensselaer School, which was led by Amos Eaton, the senior professor and a proponent of women’s education. Eaton’s innovative methods included lectures in scientific theory accompanied by practical experimentation in the laboratory, rather than rote memorization. Newton attended these schools between 1836 and 1838.

During Newton’s attendance, the assistant principal of the seminary was Willard’s sister Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps, who prepared the school’s curricula and wrote textbooks for the students. Students were allowed to challenge their marks prior to the weekly meeting to evaluate their moral gaps.

Rather than the typical finishing school curricula offered to girls, pupils studied dance, history, languages (English, French, Italian, Latin), literature, mathematics (general, algebra, geometry), music, painting, philosophy, rhetoric, and science (botany, domestic science).

At the Rensselaer School, Newton learned how to conduct research, as well as laboratory testing. Girls attending the school could study astronomy, chemistry, geography, meteorology, and natural philosophy.

Eunice Newton Foote’s family

On August 12, 1841, in East Bloomfield, Newton married Elisha Foote Jr. (1809–1883), a lawyer. Foote had trained in Johnstown, New York, under Judge Daniel Cady, the father of women’s rights activist Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

In 1844, in a sheriff’s sale, Elisha bought the house that the Stanton family moved into in 1847. He deeded it the following year to Daniel Cady, who in turn gave it to his daughter, Elizabeth in 1846. Writer Ermina Leonard described Eunice as “a fine portrait and landscape painter”, who was also known as an amateur scientist and an inventor.

On her 1862 passport application, the officials described Foote as being just under 5 ft 2 in (1.57 m) tall, with blue-gray eyes, a “rather large” mouth, with an oval face, a sallow complexion, and dark brown hair.

The marriage produced two daughters, Mary, born July 21, 1842, who became an artist, writer and women’s rights advocate; and Augusta, born October 24, 1844, who became a writer. Both daughters were born in Seneca Falls.

Elisha became a judge who worked at the Court of Common Pleas in Seneca County, but he resigned from his post in 1846. He continued working as a lawyer and Eunice designed and built a laboratory in their home.

By the spring of 1860, the family had relocated to Saratoga Springs, New York, where Augusta was privately schooled. Elisha ran a private practice and was a specialist in patent law.

Eunice Newton Foote’s Scientific career

An amateur scientist, Foote conducted a series of experiments that demonstrated the interactions of sunlight on different gases. She used an air pump, two glass cylinders, and four mercury-in-glass thermometers.

In each cylinder, she placed two thermometers and then used the pump to evacuate the air from one cylinder and compress it in the other cylinder. When both cylinders reached equal ambient temperatures, they were placed in the sunlight and temperature variances were measured.

She also placed the containers in the shade for comparison and tested the temperature results by dehydrating one cylinder and adding water to the other, to measure the effect of dry versus moist air. Foote noted that the amount of moisture in the air impacted the temperature results.

She performed this experiment on air, carbon dioxide (CO2) (which was called carbonic acid gas in her era), and hydrogen, finding that the tube filled with carbon dioxide became hotter than the others when exposed to sunlight.

She wrote: “The receiver containing this gas became itself much heated—very sensibly more so than the other—and on being removed [from the Sun], it was many times as long in cooling”.

Foote noted that CO2 reached a temperature of 125 °F (52 °C) and that the amount of moisture in the air contributed to temperature variances.

In connection with 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 an increased weight, must have necessarily resulted.” Her theory was a clear statement of climatic warming caused by increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Eunice Newton Foote’s death

Foote died on September 29 or 30, 1888, in Lenox, Massachusetts. She was buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

Eunice Newton Foote’s Legacy and Recognition

In May 2018, a symposium on Foote’s work, Science Knows No Gender: In Search of Eunice Foote Who 162 Years Ago Discovered the Principal Cause of Global Warming was held at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The main presenter at the symposium, the first conference specifically organized to honor Foote, was Perlin.

A short-film about Foote’s life, Eunice, was produced in 2018 by Eric Garro and Paul Bancilhon. That year, Cornell University Press released a textbook Communicating Climate Change: A Guide for Educators confirming that Foote’s work preceded that of Tyndall. The University of California, Santa Barbara Library opened a seven-month exhibit in November 2019, From Eunice Foote to UCSB: A Story of Women, Science, and Climate Change, to honor Foote’s work and legacy.

Foote’s work is now recognized as the earliest known scientific research to demonstrate the existence of greenhouse gases and their potential to effect changes in climate. The publication of her paper in the 1856 edition of the American Journal of Science and Arts is acknowledged as the first known publication in a scientific journal on physics by a woman.

The publication of her 1857 paper in that year’s Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science is acknowledged as the first time an American woman’s work had been published in the journal. The American Geophysical Union instituted The Eunice Newton Foote Medal for Earth-Life Science in 2022 to recognize exceptional scientific achievements in research which focuses on the convergence of Earth and life science.

Thanks for reading today’s news from GHKasa.com and we urge you to spread this news across the various social media networks and do follow us on our social media platforms as well on; Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Telegram and more for the latest news over the web. Send your news stories to info@ghkasa.com.