Eunice Newton Foote, a pioneer in greenhouse research

17 July 1819, Goshen (Connecticut, USA) - 30 September 1888, Lenox (Massachusetts, USA)

She attended Troy Female Seminary (later renamed Emma Willard School), where she learned the basics of chemistry and biology.

Eunice did not obtain a university degree, an avenue virtually closed to women at the time. However, her education and passion for science allowed her to devote much of her time to experimentation. In fact, she went on to publish the first two physics studies by a woman in the United States.

Until 2010, the Irish physicist John Tyndall was considered to be the first to discover, in 1859, that gas molecules such as carbon dioxide, methane, and water vapour (what we now call Greenhouse Gases) block infrared radiation. He was considered the first scientist to predict the climate impacts of small changes in atmospheric composition. However, retired geologist Raymond Sorenson, fond of collecting old technical books in his Oklahoma basement, found Eunice Newton Foote's first paper in a copy of the 1857 edition of the "Annual Scientific Discovery", edited by engineer David A. Wells. Foote's paper, entitled "Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun's rays", had been read by Joseph Henry in 1856 before the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Sorenson knew immediately that he had rediscovered a great figure forgotten by the history of science, and he told the scientific world so in January 2011 through the online geoscience journal Search and Discovery. "It is clear that Eunice Foote deserves credit for being an innovator on the question of CO2 and its potential impact on global climate warming," he wrote.

We could therefore conclude that Eunice was a pioneer in greenhouse research, anticipating John Tyndall's experiments by three years.

In her experimentation, which could be considered naively homemade, Foote used four thermometers, two glass cylinders, and a vacuum pump. He succeeded in isolating the component gases of the atmosphere and exposed them to the sun's rays, both in direct sunlight and in the shade. When he measured the change in their temperatures, he found that CO2 and water vapour absorbed enough heat that this absorption could affect the climate. At the time, what Foote described and theorised was the gradual warming of the Earth's atmosphere, i.e. what we now call the greenhouse effect.

In 1858 he made his last documented research, a publication on the electrical properties of gases at different pressures and temperatures, again relating it to the behaviour of the atmosphere.

In 1860 he obtained a patent on the "filling of soles of boots and shoes".

Foote died on 30 September 1888 at the age of 69. His body rests in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.