On an nameless desk in a spartan classroom of the pioneering Troy Female Seminary, a teenage woman with blue-grey eyes and an oceanic thoughts is bent over an astronomy ebook, making ready to revolutionize our understanding of the planet.
The 12 months is 1836.
No college anyplace on the planet would admit her.
No scientific society would grant her membership.
Nonetheless, Eunice Newton Foote (July 17, 1819–September 30, 1888) would go on to turn out to be the primary scientist to hyperlink atmospheric carbon dioxide ranges to rising planetary temperature.
One August day half a lifetime after graduating from Troy and throwing her energies on the suffrage motion — Susan B. Anthony would rejoice her as one in every of its founders — Eunice folded her arms into her lap in an auditorium filled with distinguished scientists and their dressed up wives as she waited to observe another person current her personal work. A decade earlier, astronomer Maria Mitchell had turn out to be the primary girl admitted into America’s scientific pantheon, the American Affiliation for the Development of Science — however on the default certificates of admission, the phrase Fellow had been crossed out in pencil and Honorary Member handwritten over it. Ladies have been nonetheless within the shadows of science. Like Beatrix Potter’s revelatory research into the reproduction of algae, Eunice Foote’s paper was learn on her behalf by a person: the secretary of the Smithsonian Establishment.
That paper — Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays, printed in 1856 — would stay the one physics paper printed by an American girl for 3 many years, till a 12 months after Eunice’s dying.
In it, she detailed her easy, ingenious experiments demonstrating the heat-absorbing properties of water vapor and carbon dioxide:
Utilizing 4 thermometers, an air pump, and two glass cylinders — one full of carbon dioxide (or “carbonic acid fuel,” because it was then identified) and the opposite with abnormal air — she discovered that when positioned in direct daylight, the CO2 cylinder trapped extra warmth and maintained it longer than the opposite.
She concluded that “an environment of that fuel would give to our earth a excessive temperature” and that if carbon dioxide ranges in our present ambiance have been to rise, so would the planet’s temperature.
Right here was the primary human being to whisper the specter of world warming. And right here was an period that silenced half its voices. The very man who offered her paper commented that whereas her experiments have been “fascinating and precious,” they have been of doubtful significance. For greater than a century, our cultural mythos would rejoice the Irish physicist John Tyndall — an ardent opponent of girls’s suffrage — because the discoverer of what we now name the greenhouse impact. In 1859, he linked carbon dioxide and world warming in 1859. Three years earlier, he had contributed to the identical concern of The American Journal of Arts and Sciences through which Eunice Foote’s paper was printed; it was customary for publishers to ship copies to all contributors.
Immediately, Eunice Foote is honored with an eponymous medal awarded by the American Geophysical Union for groundbreaking scientific analysis.
Complement her story with that of the polymathic Scottish mathematician Mary Somerville, for whom the word scientist was coined and these visionary maps of time, space, and thought by Emma Willard — America’s first feminine cartographer and data designer, founding father of the Troy Feminine Seminary the place Eunice Foote first fell below the spell of science — then leap ahead a century with Rachel Carson and the birth of the modern environmental movement.
