Most people have never heard of Eunice Newton Foote. Yet this 19th-century American scientist was the first person to identify the mechanism behind the greenhouse effect — a discovery that sits at the very heart of our understanding of climate change. So why did history forget her?
A curious mind in an era that didn't welcome women in science
Eunice Newton Foote was born in 1819 in Connecticut. From an early age, she was drawn to the natural sciences — which was remarkable in itself, given that women at the time had almost no formal access to scientific education. Despite those barriers, Foote found a way to pursue her curiosity and conduct real, rigorous experiments.
Her research focused on something few scientists had seriously examined: the relationship between atmospheric gases and temperature. In one of her most significant experiments, she filled glass cylinders with different gases — including carbon dioxide — and exposed them to sunlight. Her finding was striking: CO₂ heated up far more than ordinary air, and retained that heat far longer. It was a direct observation of what we now call the greenhouse effect.
Published, then promptly ignored
Foote's results were published in 1856 in the American Journal of Science — a legitimate, respected scientific journal. Her work came just a few years after Joseph Fourier had theorized, in broad strokes, that Earth's atmosphere might trap heat like a greenhouse. But where Fourier dealt in theory, Foote delivered hard experimental data.
Despite this, it was the British physicist John Tyndall — who published similar findings three years later — who became the name history remembered as the discoverer of the greenhouse effect. Foote's work was quietly set aside.
This wasn't an accident. Women were systematically excluded from the major scientific institutions of the 19th century. Foote could publish, but she couldn't present her own work at conferences, couldn't join the societies where reputations were made, and couldn't command the same attention as her male peers. Her discovery didn't disappear because it was flawed — it disappeared because she was a woman.
A historical injustice hiding in plain sight
Foote's story is a striking reminder of how much the scientific record has been shaped not just by discovery, but by who was allowed to be taken seriously. Her experiments predate the broader scientific conversation about climate that would eventually reshape the world — and had her work received the recognition it deserved, the public understanding of climate change might have developed decades earlier.
She was only rediscovered in 2011, when historian Raymond Sorenson came across her paper while researching 19th-century science. For over 150 years, her contribution had been hiding in an archive, unread and uncredited.
If you're curious about how the way we picture scientists shapes who becomes one, this piece on what children draw when asked to picture a scientist is worth a read.
What her story still teaches us
The quality of scientific work has never depended on the gender of the person doing it. Eunice Newton Foote's experiments were careful, original, and consequential. She simply never received the credit she earned.
Today, as climate science sits at the center of global debate, it feels especially important to name the people who laid its foundations — including the ones who were written out. Foote's legacy is now being slowly restored, and her story serves as both an inspiration and a warning: brilliance without recognition is still brilliance, but history has a responsibility to get it right.
Her name may never carry the same weight as Einstein's or Tyndall's in popular culture. But for anyone who cares about where our understanding of the climate came from — and who paid the price to build it — Eunice Newton Foote deserves to be remembered.
