SYMHC Classics: Eunice Newton Foote

Summary

Podcast Summary: Stuff You Missed in History Class – "Eunice Newton Foote"

Episode Date: August 23, 2025
Hosts: Tracy V. Wilson, Holly Frey
Original Air Date: September 8, 2021 (Classic Re-air)
Main Theme:
This episode spotlights Eunice Newton Foote, a 19th-century American scientist and women's rights activist, who was the first known person to experimentally link atmospheric carbon dioxide levels to warming climate—predating John Tyndall by three years. The hosts explore Foote’s overlooked contributions to science, her personal history, her involvement in early feminist movements, and the subsequent handling of her legacy by the scientific community.

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Episode Overview

• Purpose:
  To recover and discuss the legacy of Eunice Newton Foote—a scientist who demonstrated the connection between CO₂ and climate warming in 1856—and to explore the barriers she faced as a woman in science.
• Relevance:
  The episode is re-aired in the context of climate policy news (02:14), clearly illustrating the timeliness and importance of understanding the roots of climate science.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Foote’s Early Life & Education

• Born in Connecticut, 1819; moved to East Bloomfield, NY as a child (05:19–05:59).
• Attended Troy Female Seminary (now Emma Willard School), which prioritized science education and "learning by doing"—uncommon for women’s schools then (06:23–07:32).
  • “Eunice would not only have attended lectures on the scientists, she also would have learned about designing and conducting experiments as part of scientific study.” (07:00, Tracy)
• Possible, but undocumented, connection to Elizabeth Cady Stanton through the seminary (07:32).

2. Marriage, Family, and Women’s Rights Activism

• Married Elisha Foote in 1841; lived in Seneca Falls (07:59).
• Both were significant participants in the Seneca Falls Convention (1848), co-signing the Declaration of Sentiments (08:37).
  • Eunice served on the committee to keep the conference proceedings.

3. Inventive Life and Scientific Pursuits

• Both Eunice and Elisha were prolific inventors, holding patents (10:17–11:54).
  • Eunice’s patents: Shoe sole filling (anti-squeak, 1860), paper-making machine (notably cost-saving for paper manufacturers).
• Elisha specialized in patent law and held positions at the U.S. Patent Office, reaching Commissioner (1868) (11:54–13:58).

4. Scientific Contributions and Experiments

• In 1856, both presented research at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) (19:52–21:44).
  • Elisha's work: Sun’s rays and temperature measurement.
  • Eunice's work: Effect of different air compositions (CO₂, water vapor, dry air, hydrogen) on solar heating (23:28–25:47).
    • Her apparatus: Two glass cylinders, with different gases, exposed to sunlight—measured temperature increases.
    • Key Finding: "The highest effect of the sun’s rays I have found to be in carbonic acid gas." (24:36, Tracy reading Eunice’s words)
    • Concluded that higher atmospheric CO₂ leads to higher global temperatures.

Notable Quote

“An atmosphere of that gas would give to our Earth a high temperature." – Eunice Newton Foote (25:07)

• Context: Her ideas prefigured the modern concept of greenhouse gases.

5. Reception, Gender Barriers, and Attribution

• Eunice’s paper read by Joseph Henry (of Smithsonian); origin of this arrangement is ambiguous—possibilities include gender bias, policy, or honorary intention (21:15–28:27).
  • Joseph Henry’s prefacing remark:

"Science was of no country and of no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true." (29:45, from Henry via Wells)

• Scientific American and other journals reported positively on her work, highlighting both her scientific achievements and capability as a woman in science (36:34–38:28).
  • “The experiments of Mrs. Foote afford abundant evidence of the ability of woman to investigate any subject with originality and precision.” (38:04, Tracy quoting Sci Am)
• However, other periodicals were dismissive or sexist, critiquing women’s involvement as ornamental or trivial (39:40–40:44).

6. Legacy and Recognition

• John Tyndall independently conducted similar research in 1859—he is now more commonly credited as the “founder of climate science.” (41:41–44:13)
• The idea that Tyndall was aware of and ignored Foote’s work is debated; the consensus leans toward a lack of transatlantic scientific communication, rather than deliberate exclusion (41:41–42:42).
• Svante Arrhenius later quantifies the greenhouse effect and CO₂’s role (43:13).

Modern Rediscovery

• Foote’s work was largely ignored in mainstream histories until renewed attention in the 21st century, especially after Raymond Sorensen’s 2011 paper (44:13–45:28).
• Earlier academic sources did reference Foote’s scientific contributions (46:32–47:50).
• A short film, "Eunice," was released in 2018 (47:50).

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Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

• On Women’s Role in Science:
  "The association did allow women as members...although again, there were certainly men in the AAAS who considered women more like companions and ornaments for the male membership than participants..." (26:31, Tracy)
• Henry’s Preface:
  “Science was of no country and of no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true." (29:45)
• Sexist Backlash (Anthropos, U.S. Magazine):
  "...displaying the last new bonnet and the richest lace on the side seats, or perhaps whispering and tittering over some trifling, ludicrous incident in the proceedings..." (39:40)
• Hosts’ Commentary:
  “It started so good, and then it lands with, why are you so dingy, women?” (40:44, Holly)
• Significance of Foote’s Contribution:
  “The significance of this wasn’t really understood at the time, but this makes Eunice Newton Foote the first person to connect carbon dioxide and water vapor, which we know today as greenhouse gases, to the Earth's climate and the possibility of a warmer planet.” (25:47, Tracy)

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Important Segments / Timestamps

• 02:14 – Present-day political context for climate science
• 05:19–07:32 – Early life and scientific education
• 08:37–09:21 – Involvement in Seneca Falls Convention
• 10:17–11:54 – Patents and inventive pursuits
• 19:52–21:44 – Introduction to AAAS, presentation context
• 23:28–25:47 – Synopsis of Foote’s experiments and findings
• 26:31–30:05 – Gender dynamics within AAAS, Joseph Henry’s remarks
• 36:34–38:28 – Press coverage and societal attitudes
• 41:41–44:13 – Scientific legacy and attribution issues
• 44:13–47:57 – Modern rediscovery and continuing efforts for recognition

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Conclusion

Episode Takeaway:
Eunice Newton Foote was a pioneering scientist whose ingenious experiments anticipated the greenhouse effect and the relationship between atmospheric CO₂ and climate. Despite her groundbreaking contributions, she was overshadowed by men in the fields of both science and history, due in no small part to the prevailing gender biases of her era. Modern researchers and advocates are only recently restoring her place in the scientific narrative.

For More:

• Watch the 2018 short film “Eunice.”
• Consult Raymond Sorensen’s papers and the citations in women's science education history.

Final Thought:
The story of Eunice Newton Foote is emblematic of how scientific progress depends as much on who tells the story as on who does the work—making episodes like this essential listening for history fans and climate advocates alike.

Transcript

[Tracy V. Wilson]

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

Happy Saturday. If you're not caught up on this news, the US Federal government has been cutting funding for wind and solar projects and pushing for increased use of fossil fuels and proposing to illegally terminate the orbiting carbon observatory satellites that monitor carbon dioxide growth and plant growth. Just sending functional satellites to burn up in the atmosphere and otherwise sabotaging American contributions to the global effort to try to slow the rate of climate change. That is something that will have a destructive impact on the entire planet, but especially some of the poorest and most vulnerable parts of the world, many of which are already struggling with things like extreme weather and sea level rise.

[Holly Fry]

So for today's Saturday classic, we are.

[Old Gays Podcast Promoter]

Replaying our episode on Eunice Newton Foote.

[Holly Fry]

The first scientist known to make a.

[Old Gays Podcast Promoter]

Connection between greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and a warming climate. She did this almost 170 years ago in 1856, and this episode originally came.

[Holly Fry]

Out on September 8th, 2021.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

You're about to write us an email saying that we only care about the climate during the Trump administration. Joe Biden was president then.

[Holly Fry]

Welcome to Stuff youf Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson.

[Holly Fry]

And I'm Holly Fry.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

We have done various episodes related to the environment on the show before. So things like the Donora smog and the Cuyahoga river fires and the London smog of 1952. We talked about extinctions in our 2018 episode on endlings and about invasive species in our episode on Australia's rabbit proof fence. And then in more recent times in our episode on Kudzu that came out not too long ago. While all of these topics are related to the environment and humans and industries, impacts on the environment, none of it's really about climate. I don't know that we've ever talked about the climate in terms of, like, the current climate crisis. We've talked about things like the Year Without a Summer, which was a climactic phenomenon. Yeah.

[Holly Fry]

And we've talked about ways different scientists have measured various aspects of the climate a little bit.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah. Some of that has come up in Unearthed.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah. Not climate itself specifically.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah. And the warming of the climate in particular, which is an ongoing emergency, obviously. So today we are going to remedy that. We're going to talk about Eunice Newton foote. And in 1856, she became the first person to make a connection between the Earth's temperature and the concentration of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere. That credit, though, usually goes to John Tyndall, who made the same connection a few years later.

[Holly Fry]

Eunice Newton was born in goshen, Connecticut, on July 17, 1819, and she was baptized on September 29th of that year. Her father's name was Isaac Newton Jr. Which is a delightful coincidence considering Eunice's path in life. And her mother's name was Thirza, and Eunice was the 11th of their 12 children. Isaac, not a scientist or philosopher, but a farmer. And although he seems to have been.

[Old Gays Podcast Promoter]

Very successful at this, he also liked.

[Holly Fry]

To invest in various business ventures and.

[Old Gays Podcast Promoter]

These did not always work out.

[Holly Fry]

And by the time he died in 1835, he was deeply in debt.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Sometime after Eunice was born, but well before her father's death, the family moved to East Bloomfield, New York. And that's where Eunice's parents would live for the rest of their lives. And really beyond that, we just don't know much about her early life, except that in 1836, when she was about 17, she enrolled at Troy Female Seminary that later became known as the Emma Willard School after its founder.

[Holly Fry]

It's possible that Eunice left journals, correspondence, or other personal accounts of her time in Troy or other times in her life. But if she did, they have not been brought to light. So we don't really know much more about her time at the seminary than we do about her earlier life. But there are a couple of conclusions that we can draw.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

One is that her education there would have had a really strong foundation in science, and that's something that wasn't really typical for a school at the time. Emma Willard corresponded and collaborated with Amice Eaton, who was co founder of the Rensselaer School, that's now Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. That was about seven miles or 11 kilometers away from Troy. Eaton was a natural scientist and an educational reformer, and his reforms included a focus on learning by doing rather than focusing on memorization. So Willard's curriculum for the Women's Seminary incorporated a lot of these ideas. So Eunice would not only have attended lectures on the scientists, she also would have learned about designing and conducting experiments as part of scientific study.

[Holly Fry]

It's also possible that Eunice's time at the seminary influenced a connection that would happen later in her life. Eunice was at the seminary from 1836 to 1838, and later on she would live near and work with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who graduated from Troy female seminary in 1832. So it is possible, but not really documented anywhere, that these two women felt a connection thanks to their having gone to the same school.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

On August 12, 1841, when Eunice was 22, she married Elisha Foote, who was about 10 years older than she was. After their marriage, they moved to Seneca Falls, New York, also home to Elizabeth Cady Stanton. At one point, Elisha actually bought the home that's known today as the Elizabeth Cady Stanton House, although it doesn't look like the Foots ever lived in that house. Both of Eunice and Elisha's children were born in Seneca Falls, and those were Mary, who was born on July 21 of 1842. And Augusta, who was born October 24, 1844.

[Holly Fry]

In 1848, while living in Seneca Falls, both Eunice and Elisha were involved with the women's rights movement and the Seneca Falls Convention. Eunice was one of the five women on the committee that was tasked with keeping the conference proceedings. She and Elisha also both signed the Declaration of Sentiments that was crafted during the Convention. On most reproductions of that document, Eunice's signature is fifth after Lucretia Mott, Harriet Katie Eaton, Margaret Pryor, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Again, we don't have a lot of personal remembrance of her, but all of this suggests that she was an active and involved participant in this phase of the women's rights movement in the United States.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

While living in Seneca Falls, Eunice became a member of the American Art Union, which worked to promote the creation and sale of American art. Elisha became District Attorney for Seneca county and then a judge of the Court of Common Pleas.

[Holly Fry]

Eventually, the Foots moved from Seneca Falls to Saratoga Springs, New York. And regardless of where they lived, both Elisha and Eunice seemed to have both been really interested in experiments and inventions. Their published work suggests that they set up laboratories in their homes where they did experimental work that they hoped would be worthy of publication. This includes the papers that were read at the American association for the Advancement of science meeting in 1856, which is where we are at chronologically in this story. But we're going to have a lengthier discussion of Eunice's scientific work later, so for now we will move on to the rest of what we know about her life.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In addition to their published scientific work, both Elisha and Eunice applied for and were granted multiple patents. Eunice's patents included one for a quote, filling for soles of boots and shoes. This kept the boots and the shoes from squeaking. That patent was issued in 1860. Later, she developed a paper making machine. According to a favorable write up of this machine in the Boston Post in 1864, one Massachusetts paper maker that put this invention into use was saving $157 a day in materials, which would have been a significant amount in 1864. That same article suggested that wrapping and printing papers that were made using this method would cost 2 or 3 cents less per pound than other paper did.

[Holly Fry]

One of Elisha's specialties as an attorney was patent law, and he represented himself in legal disputes involving his patents. And since some of his patents were financially valuable, there were several of those. For example, one of his inventions was a device to regulate the draft of stoves. And a dispute over this patent led all the way to the U.S. supreme Court in Silsbee vs. Foote. This was honestly too convoluted a case to be summed up in an episode that is not about Elisha, or potentially even just that case. But a similar device already existed when Foote's patent was granted. But this case also just includes a ton of back and forth about who had been allowed to introduce what into evidence and how much money was owed to whom. It was a big tangle, not really.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In the scope of today's show. Yeah, when we've done Supreme Court cases on the show before, I've usually really enjoyed reading the text of the Supreme Court decision, but this one just made my eyes cross. I was like, I can't. What are you even saying here? So in 1864, though, Elisha was appointed to the US Patent Office Board of Appeals. And then in 1868, he became the 11th Commissioner of Patents for the United States. His work at the Patent Office would have required him to be in Washington, D.C. by this point, the Foot daughters, Mary and Augusta, were grown. They were soon to be married. It's not entirely clear whether they and Eunice went with him, but we do.

[Holly Fry]

Know that Eunice did at least visit. On April 16, 1868, Susan B. Anthony's newspaper, the Revolution, published a piece by Elizabeth Cady Stanton which recounted a trip to Washington, D.C. it read in part, quote, judge Foote and his scientific wife escorted us to the Patent Office, which, like all other departments of government, we are told, is used for political ends. We did not go there, however, to lay bare its corruptions and favoritisms, but merely that we might have it in our power to refute the assertion of the Reverend Dr. Todd, trepanned by Gail Hamilton, who, in his recent attack on his fair country women, said that there had been no inventors among our sex. And there we found many witnesses against the unhappy Todd. Mrs. Eunice Foote has herself taken out several patents and is occupied at this time making a new kind of paper.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

A bit later, Stanton went on to say, quote, Mrs. Foote remarked to us that she had no doubt that half the patents there were the inventions of women. But as men had the money to get up the models and loved notoriety, they had been taken out in their names. If the Reverend Todd will take the trouble to investigate this matter for himself, he will no doubt find this to be true.

[Holly Fry]

Elisha was the Commissioner of Patents for a little less than a year, until April of 1869, and then he returned to his private law practice. By the late 1870s, he and Eunice had moved to St. Louis to live with their daughter Mary, who had married John B. Henderson. Henderson had served as the U.S. senator for Missouri from 1862 to 1869 and was co author of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. constitution, which outlawed slavery except as punishment for a crime.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This is another one of those moments we're not really having a lot of personal accounts about or from her means. We don't know a lot of what was going on behind the scenes. So this whole stretch, you know, has happened over a period of time that included the U. S. Civil War, and we just don't have a lot of information about anything in their lives related to that. We can reasonably conclude though that their daughter marrying the co author of the thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution probably means that they were all against slavery in this context, but not something that's particularly written down anywhere.

[Holly Fry]

Yeah, one would hope, but as we.

[Old Gays Podcast Promoter]

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[Holly Fry]

Feels the same way.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Yeah, and not everybody in New York or any of the other places they live was totally aligned on that, even though the states in question had outlawed slavery by the time the Civil War started. Anyway, to return to the story, Elijah died of heart disease at the henderson home on October 22, 1883, and Eunice's life after that point is pretty much a mystery. She died on September 30, 1888 in Lenox, Massachusetts at the age of 69. Both she and Elisha were interred in the Foote family mausoleum in Greenwood cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

[Holly Fry]

According to a 1915 Newton family genealogy that was compiled by Ermina Newton. Leonard Eunice was, quote, a fine portrait and landscape painter. She was an inventive genius and a person of unusual beauty. No picture of Eunice survives, at least not one that has been unearthed yet. But her science writing does, and we'll talk more about that after a sponsor break.

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

The American association for the Advancement of Science was established in Boston in 1847, and it held its first meeting in Philadelphia in 1848. The organization's purpose was to both promote and advance science, and to that end it had an official membership roster, but it also arranged annual meetings that were open to the public.

[Holly Fry]

In terms of its membership in those early years, there were no strict criteria. Anyone who was nominated with someone else seconding the nomination was admitted as a member. It was incredibly rare for someone to be denied, and for the most part, once you were a member, you were a member for life as long as you paid your dues. But that rule only came into being after the organization realized that there were a lot of people on its membership list who were not paying dues and weren't really active anymore.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

It was one of those moments where people were looking at the membership list like, who are these people? Are they even still alive? Don't really know. Elisha Foote was elected to the American association for the Advancement of science at its 10th meeting, which was held in Albany, New York in August of 1856, and at that meeting he also read a paper that he had written, which was titled on the Heat of the Sun's Rays. According to the program, he was to read his paper on Friday, August 22, but some accounts place it as happening on the 23rd.

[Holly Fry]

Eunice's paper is listed in the program immediately after Elisha's, with a note that it was to be read by Professor Henry. That was Professor Joseph Henry, who was the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a past president of the aaas. Although the program that was printed ahead of the meeting shows both of the Foote's papers with the same title, the When Eunice's was printed later, it was with the title Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun's Rays.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

So, side note here, for reasons that are not clear to me at all, neither Elisha's nor Eunice's papers was printed in the proceedings of this 1856 AAAS meeting, nor were they included in the list of papers that were not being printed because their authors hadn't turned in a copy to be printed. Which delights me that that was a list in there and that there were 76 papers on it, which just feels like a lot. It's tricky to tell how that number of 76 papers compares to the total number of papers that were read, though, because in the program, some of the papers were read more than once. So I tried to figure that out to be like, okay, how many people read a paper and didn't turn in a copy of the paper? And then I was like, I'm gonna have to print all this thing out and cross off duplicates. And that's just not happening today. So both these papers, though, were later printed in volume 22 of the American Journal of Science and Arts. That was in November of 1856. Each of the papers was noted as having been read at the AAAS meeting. So it's just kind of a mystery exactly what went on in terms of the proceedings.

[Holly Fry]

Given their similar subject matter and some common elements in their methods, it's likely that Elisha and Yunus collaborated with one another on their experiments and their papers. Elisha's used a variety of setups to compare the ambient temperature to the temperature that the thermometer recorded when it was placed in the sun, measuring what he called the relative heat of the sun's rays, which got stronger when the ambient temperature was hotter. He also did the same experiment using a burning glass to focus the sun's rays.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Eunice's experiment looked at how the heat of the sun affected different gases. In her words, the experiments were made with an air pump and two cylindrical receivers of the same size, about 4 inches in diameter and 30 in length. In each were placed two thermometers, and the air was exhausted from one and condensed in the other. After both had acquired the same temperature, they were placed in the sun side by side. And while the action of the sun's rays rose to 110 degrees in the condensed tube, it attained only 88 degrees in the other. She concluded in this part of the paper that this circumstance must affect the power of the sun's rays in different places and contribute to their feeble action on the summits of lofty mountains.

[Holly Fry]

She doesn't specify what these cylinders were made of, but they were presumably glass. Eunice repeated the same experiment using air that had been saturated with moisture in one tube and air that had been dried with calcium chloride in the other. And she found that when the cylinders were placed in the sun, the air that was full of water vapor got hotter than the dry air did.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

And third, she repeated the same experiment with common air in one tube and carbonic acid gas, which was the term used at the time for carbon dioxide. In the other, she wrote, quote, the highest effect of the sun's rays I have found to be in carbonic acid gas. She also noted that the receiver containing the gas became itself much heated, very sensibly, more so than the other, and on being removed, it was many times as long in cooling.

[Holly Fry]

Foote concluded by saying of the carbonic acid gas, an atmosphere of that gas would give to our Earth a high temperature. And if, as some suppose, at one period of its history, the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its own action as well as from increased weight must have necessarily resulted. On comparing the sun's heat in different gases, I found it to be in hydrogen gas 104 degrees, in common air, 106 degrees, in oxygen gas, 108 degree in and in carbonic acid gas, 125 degrees.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The significance of this wasn't really understood at the time, but this makes Eunice Newton Foot the first person to connect carbon dioxide and water vapor, which we know today as greenhouse gases, to the Earth's climate and the possibility of a warmer planet.

[Holly Fry]

There are a lot of sources that say that Eunice was prohibited from reading this paper at the AAAS meeting because she was a woman, and that that's why Joseph Henry read it on her behalf. And there were definitely men in the AAAS who did not think women belonged there. But the association did allow women as members. The first woman to be elected was astronomer Maria Mitchell in 1850. Entomologist Margaretta Morris was elected that same year.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

AAAS meetings were open to the public and the AAAS had issued an open invitation for women to attend itself first meeting in 1848. And women frequently did attend, although again, there were certainly men in the AAAS who considered women more like companions and ornaments for the male membership than participants, like active participants with knowledge and interests of their own.

[Holly Fry]

Eunice was not a member of the aaas, but non members also presented papers at every AAAS meeting between 1848 and 1860. Strangely, AAAS records of non member activity don't record any non members presenting in 1856. That may be because Joseph Henry read Eunice's paper for her or because she was considered to be covered under her husband's membership. That list also assumes the non members in question are men.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

So it also wasn't unheard of for people's papers to be read by someone other than the author themselves at that 1856 meeting. Arthur Schott's paper on the geology of The Lower Rio Bravo was read by topographical engineer W.H. emery, who was a major in the US Army. Emory also read Marine T.W. chandler's on the meteorological phenomena observed at various points on the boundary survey. And the reasons for Emry reading these two papers in proxy for someone else that's not really noted anywhere.

[Holly Fry]

So it's possible that the organizers of the aaas meeting in 1856 prevented Eunice from reading her own paper because she was a woman. But if that is the case, it's just not documented anywhere. And the ongoing involvement of women in the AAAS at this point suggests that there may have been some other explanation. Foote is the only woman known to have presented a paper that year, even though it was presented by proxy.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

And as a note on that proxy, Joseph Henry was extremely prominent and well respected in the scientific community, so it's also possible that his reading of the paper was intended as an honor. He also seems to have felt compelled to make some remarks on the subject of women's roles in science. Although there's no word for word transcript of what these remarks were anywhere, they were summarized in an 1857 volume that was edited by David A. Wells. And this was titled we have a long title, which everyone knows we love. Annual of Scientific Discovery or Yearbook of Facts in Science and art for 1857, exhibiting the most important discoveries and improvements in mechanics, useful arts, natural philosophy, chemistry, astronomy, meteorology, zoology, botany, mineralogy, geology, geography, antiquities, et cetera, together with a list of recent scientific publications, a classified list of patents, obituaries of eminent scientific men, notes on the progress of science during the year 1856, et cetera.

[Holly Fry]

That's a zippy one. Just rolls off the tongue.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I got almost to the end of the list of subjects before I had to take a breath.

[Holly Fry]

Before summarizing the content of Foote's paper, Wells characterized Henry's comments this way. Quote, Professor Henry then read a paper by Mrs. Eunice Foot, prefacing it with a few words to the effect that science was of no country and of no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

If Eunice Newton Foote was indeed prohibited from reading her own paper in the 1856 AAAS meeting, that Prohibition seems to have been lifted the next year, 1857. That year she was scheduled to read on a new source of electrical excitation at the annual meeting in Montreal. According to the program, she was to present her paper on Friday, August 14, and there is no notation in the program that would suggest that she did not read it herself, although there's another report that suggests that she was introduced again by Joseph Henry.

[Holly Fry]

This second paper documented an experiment she had done over the course of eight months, again using pumps to either condense or evacuate air in a container. She concluded, quote, the compression or expansion of atmospheric air produces an electrical excitation.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

There are only two physics papers known to have been written by women and published in American journals prior to 1889, and they are these two papers by Eunice Newton Foot. She also wrote two of the only 16 physics papers known to have been published by American women in the entire 19th century.

[Holly Fry]

Also in 1859, after ongoing discussion with the AAAS about women's roles in the organization, this statement was printed in the proceedings of its 13th meeting. QUOTE no action is necessary in regard to the motion to admit ladies as members. In as much as two ladies have already been admitted. It's not clear whether that motion that's referenced was made and addressed before or after educator and scientist Elmyra Lincoln Phelps became a member, which happened at that meeting. Elmira Lincoln Phelps, Mariah Mitchell and Margaretta Morris are the only three women known to have officially been AAAS members before 1860, although since many people on the member list included only their initials, there might have been others.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

We'll talk about how Eunice Newton Foote's papers were received and their impact after another quick sponsor break.

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Foreign.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Joseph Henry read Eunice Newton Foote's paper at the 1856 meeting of the AAAS. It got some attention in both the United States and Europe in both popular and scientific journals. As we said earlier, both the Foote's papers were published in full in the American Journal of Science and Arts and David A. Wells Annual of Scientific Discovery paraphrased both of their papers as well as Henry's introductory remarks of Eunice's paper. Even though Eunice's paper is much shorter than her husband's, his synopsis of Eunice's a little longer than the one of her husband's, is Perhaps she was so.

[Holly Fry]

Succinct he felt he needed to like, really make sure people understood the September 1856 issue of Scientific American included an article titled Scientific Ladies Experiments with Condensed Gases. It commented on women's participation in science reading, in part owing to the nature of women's duties. Few of them have had the leisure or the opportunities to pursue science experimentally, but those of them who have had the taste and the opportunity to do so have shown as much power and ability to investigate and observe correctly as mental.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This article then described Foote's experiment and her conclusions before dipping a toe into a debate that was going on at the time between the plutonists and the Neptunists. Briefly, plutonists argued that the Earth had previously been molten and that rocks were formed through volcanic activity, while Neptunists argued that rocks had formed from sediment in the oceans. Now, neither of these two ideas was totally right and neither one was totally wrong. They both had some valid points and some inaccuracies, but geologists were just divided into these two camps. The author of this Scientific American article contended that Foote's experiments provided, quote, a more rational cause for, quote, ancient great atmospheric heat than the idea of the Earth. Having previously been a fiery ball.

[Holly Fry]

This piece ended by saying, quote, the columns of the Scientific American have been oftentimes graced with articles on scientific subjects by ladies which would do honor to men of the highest scientific reputation, and the experiments of Mrs. Foot afford abundant evidence of the ability of woman to investigate any subject with originality and precision.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The October 1856 edition of United States Magazine was overall not as flattering as that was. Its article Science and Savants in America, which was written under the pen name anthropos, covered the 1856 AAAS meeting, noting that no women or people of color were included in the organization's membership list. It's not clear what whoever wrote this article was using as the list that they were working from, because the list that was published in the conference proceedings included both Mariah Mitchell and Margaretta Morris. This article, though, claims that Foote and Mitchell were both considered to be members while not mentioning Morris at All this.

[Holly Fry]

Article mentions Henry reading Foote's paper and, quote, apologizing, as he did so, for the lady who, he said, although thus devoting her time to science, had a feminine heart. We protest against such apologies and feel that it is the opposite fact that so few of our country women can be found who give any attention to science as amateurs, pardon the solecism or investigators. It is this fact that needs either explanation or apology.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This goes on to describe, quote, ladies of perfect breeding and finish gracing by their presence the chambers in which the sessions were held and listening intently to the enunciation of abstruse principles in mathematical and physical science. This sort of sounds like it could be leading into a discussion of the barriers to women's participation in science, but it does not do that. Instead, it becomes insulting, saying, quote, we could not help asking ourself, why does it not occur to this portion of our race that they have faculties of observation and reason as well as we? And that instead of displaying the last new bonnet and the richest lace on the side seats, or perhaps whispering and tittering over some trifling, ludicrous incident in the proceedings, it is their prerogative, not less than that of man, to bring upon the tapas before a scientific body the results of their invention, investigations, discoveries and deductions in the common world of matter and mind which with them we jointly inhabit.

[Holly Fry]

It started so good, and then it lands with, why are you so dingy, women?

[Tracy V. Wilson]

I really thought, as I started reading it, I was like, oh, man, I really think this is gonna be talking a lot about, like, why there weren't women and people of color involved in this. More. No, it just became a bunch of sexist insults.

[Holly Fry]

Nice. A summary of the 1856 meetings of the British and American Associations of the Advancement of Science was published in the Canadian Journal of Industry, Science and Art. It summarizes Eunice's paper, but makes no mention of her husband's. The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal for 1857 summarizes Eunice's paper as well, but since it also mentions Elisha's work, it's a little unclear which of them the journal is attributing the experiment to. The German journal Yaresbericht printed a summary of it as well, which was dated 1856, although that actually came out in 1857.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Then, on May 18, 1859, Irish physicist John Tyndall made a similar observation to Eunice Newton Foots about the ability of water vapor and carbon dioxide gas to hold heat. He reported this observation to the Royal Society of London later that same year. And in his work, he credited French physicist Claude Matthias Poulet for having done earlier related work. And there's been some discussion about whether Tyndale knew about Eunice Newton Foote's work and disregarded it because of her sex. Roland Jackson, who was publishing in the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science in 2019, argues that he probably did not, that this omission is more about the state of scientific communication across the Atlantic in the mid 19th century century. He speculates that Tyndale just wouldn't have been likely to have read any of the journals or other publications that referenced Foote's work prior to his own observations.

[Holly Fry]

Tyndale's experimental setup was more sophisticated than Foote's was, but unlike her, he did not make the connection between these gases and the Earth's climate until later in his work. In 1861, he did some research that showed that carbon dioxide, water vapor, and hydrocarbon gases like methane absorbed more radiant energy than nitrogen and oxygen, which are the primary components of air. That's really when he started to speculate that different concentrations of these gases can affect the Earth's climate.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

The first paper to really quantify the carbon dioxide concentrations involved in the greenhouse gas effect was published by Swedish scientist Svante August Arienhus in 1896. His later work also suggests that the burning of fossil fuels contributes to this process.

[Holly Fry]

About 10 years after Tyndale published his work on this, he and Joseph Henry became acquainted. But there's no suggestion that the two of them ever talked about Foote's work and how it related to Tyndale's. However, there were other people who cited Eunice Newton Foote's work later on in the 19th century. For example, Ethan Samuel Chapin's 1888 book the Determining Force, references Henry's reading of Foote's paper at the AAAS in a section on conditions likely to affect the temperature of the Moon's surface. This section of the book discusses matter on the Moon and how different densities of that matter must have different capabilities for retaining heat.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

Okay, this is interesting to me because it suggests not only that people were familiar with what she had written about, but that they thought it was important enough to also apply it to other situations than what she was directly experimenting on. Today, John Tyndall, not Eunice Newton Foote, is often known as the founder of climate science. But over the last decade, people have been trying to correct that attribution. This effort really started in 2011 when Raymond Sorenson published Eunice Foot's pioneering research on CO2 and climate warming that was published in the American association of Petroleum Geologists. Search and Discovery Sorensen had stumbled across that summary of Foot's paper that was in the 1857 Annual of Scientific Discovery and had realized its significance.

[Holly Fry]

There was even less publicly available information about Eunice Newton Foot in 2011 than there is today. Not even the text of her paper had been unearthed at that point. Sorensen updated his paper in 2018 to note that a copy of her paper had been found in the Saratoga Springs City Historians Files in Saratoga Springs, New York, and that copy matched the one that was printed in the American Journal of Science and Arts.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

This update also clarified that it was Foote herself who made the connection between carbon dioxide gas and the Earth's climate, and the climate having been maybe previously warmer prior to the discovery of her original paper, though, it had not been clear whether she had made that connection herself or whether it was something David A. Wells had speculated on when he was writing up that little summary of it.

[Holly Fry]

However, we should note that claims that Eunice Newton Foote was totally forgotten until Raymond Sorensen published his 2011 paper are not really accurate. Sorensen does seem to have been the first person to directly point out that Foote was the first person to observe something that Tyndall got the credit for. But Sally Gregory Kohlsted's the Formation of the American Scientific Community, the American association for the Advancement of Science, 1848-1860 was published by the University of Illinois Press in 1976, and it mentions Foote delivering her paper on electrical excitation in 1857.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

In addition to that, information on Foote that's [e-mail] also includes a scan of a 1976 letter from Deborah Dean Warner, who was then curator of the history of physical Sciences at the Smithsonian, to Dr. Judith Wellman at State University of New York. Warner and Wellman had talked about Foote at the National Archives Conference on Women's History, according to this letter, and the letter mentions both of Foote's papers and their titles. Warner's Science Education for Women in Antebellum America, published In the journal Isis, a journal of the History of Science Society in 1978, also cites both of Foote's papers. Wellman's the Road to Seneca, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the first women's rights convention, which was published in 2004, also mentions both papers, existence but not their subjects, and Lois Arnold's Four Lives in Women's Education in the 19th Century, which was published in 1984, mentions Foote's article on the heat from the sun's rays, using the 1856 Scientific American article as its source on that. So there were various folks who were definitely talking about Eunice Newton Foote in other contexts before that 2011 Weaver came out.

[Holly Fry]

There's also a short film on Eunice Newton Foote called Eunice and that was released in 2018 and it is available on YouTube.

[Tracy V. Wilson]

That was a Eunice Newton Foot thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is historypodcastheartradio.com and you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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[Tracy V. Wilson]

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