Draft:Eunice Newton Foote

Eunice Newton Foote (1819–1888) was an early American climate scientist who experimented with early greenhouse gases before they were known to cause global warming. Foote was an amateur scientist who conducted at-home experiments that explored the influence of different gases in our atmosphere on the reflected sun rays. To do this, Foote used glass cylinders with a mercury thermometer inside each to determine the greenhouse effect, where the heating effect of the sun was amplified in moist air, especially in the presence of carbon dioxide. Although Foote determined the correlation between temperature and gas presence, she was not able to determine how these gases impacted solar heating. Outside of the scientific community, Foote was a suffragette and was present at the first Women's Rights convention in Seneca Falls. In the 1857 volume of David A. Wells' "Annual of Scientific Discovery," Wells states that Foote "has taken two glass cylinders of the same size, containing thermometers. Into one the air was condensed, and from the other the air was exhausted. When they were of the same temperature the cylinders were placed side by side in the sun, and the thermometers in the condensed air rose more than twenty degrees higher than those in the rarified air." However, Foote never published a paper on these findings in the American Association for the Advancement of Science Proceedings in 1856, thus there is no mention of Foote or this oral presentation in the volume. However, John Tyndall, another climate scientist, began laboratory work in 1859, two years after Foote's published records by Wells, and he is widely regarded as discovering the greenhouse effect.