08/30/2025
A woman discovered the greenhouse effect in 1856 – then history forgot her.
Her name was Eunice Foote. Using basic tools – glass cylinders, thermometers, and an air pump – she demonstrated that carbon dioxide traps heat from the Sun. In other words, she uncovered the core mechanism behind what we now call the greenhouse effect.
Foote found that different gases absorb heat at different rates, and CO₂ was the most effective. In her words, “the highest effect of the sun’s rays I have found to be in carbonic acid gas” – the 19th-century term for carbon dioxide.
This insight was groundbreaking. It linked atmospheric CO₂ to Earth’s temperature – the same connection scientists now use to understand global warming and climate change.
But Eunice Foote wasn’t allowed to present her own research. As a woman in 19th-century America, she was barred from speaking at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her paper was read aloud by a male colleague. It was briefly published… then forgotten.
Three years later, in 1859, Irish physicist John Tyndall published his own, more advanced experiments showing that gases like CO₂ and water v***r trap heat. His work became famous. His name was credited. Eunice Foote’s wasn’t mentioned.
Her discovery was lost to history for more than 150 years – until 2010, when a retired geologist named Raymond Sorenson stumbled across her forgotten paper in a dusty science journal. Since then, researchers and historians have worked to restore her legacy.
Foote wasn’t just a scientific pioneer. She was also an inventor, an early advocate for women’s rights, and a signatory of the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration – the founding document of the women’s suffrage movement in the United States.
She saw what others missed. She made history. Then she was erased from it.
It’s time to remember her.
