Eunice Newton Foote: Pioneer of Climate Science

In the summer of 1856, a woman working in a home laboratory in Seneca Falls, New York, became the first known scientist to demonstrate that carbon dioxide could absorb and retain unusual amounts of heat, and, from that finding, to reason that the gas could warm the Earth itself. Her name was Eunice Newton Foote.

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Eunice was born in 1819 near Goshen, Connecticut, the youngest of eleven children. When she was around three, her family moved to western New York, settling near East Bloomfield, in a stretch of the state so swept by waves of religious revival that it had earned the name the Burned-over District, as though the ground itself had been scorched in the midst of the fervor. In its wake, the region produced abolitionists and suffragists in outsized numbers.

At seventeen, Eunice enrolled in the Troy Female Seminary, one of the first institutions in the country to offer women an education comparable to that of men in college. At Troy, students were permitted to attend science lectures at the nearby Rensselaer School, a men’s institution, and work in its laboratories.1 Eunice took advantage of this opportunity, and there she learned chemistry and experimental methods, leaving with a scientific education that few other women in America had obtained.

After graduating, she married Elisha Foote, a patent lawyer. They settled in Seneca Falls, where they became close friends with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was then becoming one of the foremost voices for women’s rights in the country. Over the next several years, as Eunice raised two daughters, she moved in reform circles and, in 1848, attended the women’s rights convention that Stanton helped organize. It was the first of its kind in the U.S. The conference’s centerpiece was the Declaration of Sentiments, a document modeled on the Declaration of Independence that asserted the equality of men and women and demanded rights the law did not yet recognize. Eunice signed it, her name fifth on the list, just after Stanton’s.

But the education she had gotten at Troy and Rensselaer had not sat idle through these years. Somewhere between the two daughters she was raising and the reform work that filled her calendar, Eunice built a laboratory in her home. And in the summer of 1856, she put it to use. She placed glass cylinders in direct sunlight, filled each with different conditions — ordinary air, moist air, carbon dioxide — and measured the temperature inside. The cylinder filled with carbon dioxide heated faster and reached higher temperatures than the others. It also took far longer to cool. Her conclusion, written plainly in her paper: “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature.”