This illustration is the best I can do to represent American scientist Eunice Foote, since no extant images of her remain. This is a shame, because Foote was the first scientist to analyze the composition of gasses to predict what we now call the Greenhouse Effect. In 1856, hundreds of scientists were in attendance at the Eighth annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Although women were allowed to attend and could even be members, front row seats were reserved for “Professionals” and “Fellows” — all men. Eunice couldn’t even read her own paper — she had a professor of the Smithsonian Institution do it. “Circumstances affecting the heat of the sun’s rays,” showed how, by sequestering in glass containers three gasses: CO2, ordinary air in the atmosphere, and oxygen — one could test the gas that heated up and retained heat the most. “An atmosphere of [CO2] would give to our earth a high temperature,” wrote Eunice, predicting that earlier ages on earth must have contained different amounts of the gas. Foote’s research, although eventually published, went unnoticed until after 2010: instead, Irish physicist John Tyndall published similar data three years after Foote, and to him went credit for discovering the Greenhouse gas effect.
Source(s): “This lady scientist defined the Greenhouse effect but didn’t get the credit, because sexism,” _Smithsonian.com_, Leila McNeil, December 5, 2016. Image comes from a press report about an upcoming museum exhibition about Eunice Foote’s work at my old alma mater University of California Santa Barbara: “From Eunice Foote to UCSB: A History of Women, Science and Climate Change,” in the Ocean Gallery 11/05/2019-6/27/2020.
