A woman in the shadow of the greenhouse effect
- London 1859. The Irish physicist John Tyndall (1820-1893) presented at the scientific institution of the Royal Institution his latest discovery: several gas molecules, such as carbon dioxide, methane and water vapor, block infrared radiation. I mean, he discovered what we call the greenhouse effect today.
Others consider the Swedish chemist and physicist Svante Arrhenius (1859-1927), the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, as a discoverer of the greenhouse effect, because in 1896 he concluded that fossil fuels accelerated global warming.
But three years before Tyndall presented his study and 40 years before Arrhenius released these conclusions, Circumstances Affecting the Heat of Sun’s Rays presented the work of Joseph Henry, a member of the Smithsonian Institute, Albanyn (United States). At the annual session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But that work was not written by Henry, but presented on request. Women were forbidden to participate in AAAS meetings and the author of the article was the woman, the first scientist to understand the basis of the greenhouse effect.
Eunice Newton Foote (1818-1889), a climatologist, inventor and American suffragist, had the opportunity to refuse most women as a teenager; he studied at Troy Female Seminary, a school that allowed girls to attend science talks. However, it had scarce resources to develop this received scientific basis. For example, research on the greenhouse effect was done at home. Using four thermometers, two glass cylinders and a vacuum pump, he isolated the gases that make up the atmosphere and subjected them to lightning solares.Concluy or that CO2 and water vapor absorbed enough heat to alter the climate.
He had little means of conducting experiments, let alone spreading an important discovery. Although in some sources it is said that Tyndall “stole” Foot’s work, Tyndall surely never knew about it. And in the century and a half, the scientific community didn't even mention Foote.
In 2011, independent researcher Raymond Sorenson wrote a first article about Foote. In the summer of 2016, Canadian climatologist Katharine Hayhoe asked why there were no women in the history of the climatology. Hoyho did not answer with words. Pulling Sorenson's thread, Foot rescued and disseminated, among other things, the original article written by Facebook. Shortly thereafter, the climatologist Ed Hawkins received the Facebook link in a tweet and, from that moment on, Eunice Newton Foote has gradually incorporated himself into the history of science.
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