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August 19, 2022 28 mins

Yves joins us once again to share the story of Eunice Foote, the first known person to link carbon dioxide to atmospheric warming. 

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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and welcome to stuff
I Never told you production of I Heart Radio. And
today we are doing another female first, which means we
are once again joined by our good friend, the fabulous,

(00:25):
the Magnificent Eve's welcome Eves. Hey everyone, Yeah, thanks, Yeah,
I'm welcoming you now because I'm taking this show over.
You are welcome to I've been waiting you are never
welcoming to us all along to just comment this space.

(00:46):
I love it. It came out of you. Just you
give off a welcoming vibe, to be honest, you, so
we're happy to give it to you. And we're you know,
we were just having a very fun conversation about because
we're having some technological woes. We're talking about science today, um,

(01:07):
and some old school technologies and things that we used
to do around like old like iPods and old phones
and like mity ring tones and all that stuff. That
is one of my very favorite things, honestly to talk about.
Like I love the sort of obscure technology that is

(01:27):
useless now but at one time was the coolest thing. Yeah,
and how cumbersome and just inefficient some of those things were. Yeah,
I was going back through a bin of a lot
of my old stuff and just running down memory lane
and thinking about all this, the rhyme stone stickers that
I put things that were just completely unnecessary and truly
got in the way more so than did anything for aesthetics.

(01:52):
I feel like a lot of a lot of the
stuff from that time, you've summed it up very well,
was cumbersome. But we liked it. Yes, yes, that is
one of my very favorite things. I was telling them,
as samanthony Us before this, that I I had like
a song for everybody who would call me, and then

(02:14):
I had a very long answering message, like a voicemail
message that I purchased with my money in high school.
And it was a mission impossible, themes like, it was
way too long. It was embarrassing, but you know, I
liked it. Yeah, wasn't it. I don't know if I'm
remembering this incorrectly or not, but weren't you also able

(02:35):
to make songs ring tones of the dial tone when
somebody call you, you would hear the song that that
person on the other the receiving in what wants you
to hear? Was that a thing? Yeah? Yeah, oh, it
was a thing, And It was always started with this
song is brought to you by whomever, the company they
bought it from. Oh yes, so overnoxious. It was not.

(03:00):
It's also making a lot of assumptions about what people
on the other side want to hear, like that's true,
that's true. It's kind of a thought exercise at that point,
too much. I got into it. Mine was It was
a very short snippet from a song Homecoming on the
American Idiot album by Green Day, and it was nobody

(03:22):
likes you, Nobody wants to hang out with you. That
was my song. So people were sending very overt messages
to the people that I'm like, wait, are you mad
at me? Or should I be concerned for you? Like?
Where are we today? It was loved you questioning. Oh gosh,

(03:44):
I could talk about this forever, but we do have
a lot to discuss today. This is a fascinating story
and a fascinating person you've brought to as eaves um,
So who are we talking about today? Today? We're talking
about Unice Foot and her first was that she was
as person to link carbon dioxide to atmospheric warming, which
is related to a lot of the things we talked

(04:06):
about today because it's related to climate change, even though
her and a lot of other people who were working
in physics at the time weren't quite as concerned as
we are today with climate change and the effects that
it can have. But they were looking at the history, um,
and the present and a little bit of the future
of what it meant for the climate to be different

(04:27):
at different points in time and how that affected the
populations on Earth. And this was one of those ones
where it was striking to me that, uh, this conversation
had gone back further than I realized, and we're still
having it very like urgent matter today. Just that it
they were talking about it back then and steadying it

(04:49):
back then. Um, it just really stuck with me. Yeah,
I know, yeah, because this well, Unice, she was born
in eighteen nineteen, so this kind station was happening all
the way back in the eighteen hundreds, And of course
there was their understanding of climate science was a lot
different than it is today, and they didn't use a

(05:10):
lot of the same terminology that we used today, and
they didn't have because they didn't have the same understanding.
But she was part of this foundation. She was part
of the pioneering group of people, albeit her contributions weren't
as weighty or significant, or maybe wady is the wrong word.
She just didn't go as deep into UM the research
around these things as some of the other UM scientists

(05:31):
who were working in the field did. But she was
a significant part of this history. So we can start
when she was born. So she was born on July seventeen,
eighteen nineteen and Goshen, Connecticut. Her name was Eunice Newton
UM and she was one of eleven children. Her parents
did have twelve children, but one of her sisters had

(05:52):
died as a young child, and her parents were Tears
of Newton. That was spelled t h I r Z
A not exactly sure how to put out SEP, but
tears and Newton will say and Isaac Newton Jr. Was
her father's name. Reportedly he was a distant relative of
Isaac Newton. And she went to Troy Female Seminary, which

(06:13):
was a school in New York which is now called
Emma Willard School, and through her experience here she was
able to attend science lectures at a nearby school, so
early on she did have some study and training in science.
Though UM she didn't go that deeply into her scientific
training in academia, but she spent most of her earlier

(06:36):
years in New York, and she did read scientific journals
and she conducted her own experiments, so she was doing
her She had her own personal interests in philosophy and science,
and she chose to pursue those things in her personal life.
But at the time, as we know we talked about
UM in recent episodes when we spoke a little bit
about astronomy in a previous episode in women's role in

(06:58):
science in that few old but in general, scientific fields
were dominated by men at the time for various reasons,
and women's access to studying, researching, and publishing in science
was restricted. Plus, physics research and interests in the US
kind of pilled in comparison to what was happening in Europe.
So there was a lot more chatter and a lot

(07:20):
more research and interest in research from scientists in the
general population in the physics field in Europe, but there
was still some in the US. It just wasn't happening
at the same scale. UM. In eighteen forty one, she
married Alicia Foote, who was a judge, amateur scientist, an
inventor and a mathematician, and at one point he served

(07:42):
as commissioner of the U. S. Patent Office. The two
of them had two daughters, which was married in eighteen
forty two and Augusta in eighteen forty four. UM. And
it's noted that in eighteen forty eight she signed the
Declaration of Sentiments UM, which I'm sure a lot of
your dance would be familiar with, since y'all talk about
feminist history a lot that happened at the Seneca Falls

(08:05):
Convention in New York. Her husband also signed the declaration,
and that document advocated for women's rights, and she ended
up doing There's there's not a ton of history written
about her early life and her education, UM, and some
of the things that she did around her role in
advocacy for women's rights. But she was in New York

(08:27):
and was moving in the same fields as other feminists
and other abolitionists and a lot of people who were
activists at the time in spaces like that. Moving on

(08:47):
to her scientific work, she did do an experiment that
could have been a response to theories that she had
read in Scientific American about how the sun heats Earth.
And as I said, her husband was also an amateur scientist.
He was an inventor, and she was also an inventor,
but her husband was also doing studies on solar radiation
at the time. He became a member of the American

(09:10):
Association for the Advancement of Science in eighteen fifty six. So,
in Unite's experiment, she used thermometer. She used two glass cylinders,
and she used an air pump and her work and
she put a thermometer in each of those tubes to
measure its temperature. She exposed these cylinders to the sun,

(09:31):
and she used the pump to draw air from one
and compress it in the other. And she found that
the cylinder with compressed air heated faster. She also found
that the moist air heated faster than the dry air.
And she found that the cylinder with what she called
carbonic acid gas also known as carbon dioxide got much

(09:52):
hotter than the cylinder that was full of what she
called common air. And so here's a quote from what
she's said in her study. 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
and cooling an atmosphere of that gas would give to

(10:15):
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. So she also in that experiment
tested cylinders that contain hydrogen and oxygen. So there have

(10:39):
been recently in recent years people who have written about
her work kind of a resurgence of interest in her
work after it was dug back up from the archives.
According to a paper that was written by Joseph d
Ortiz and Roland Jackson, Unice aimed to and she did,
answer the following three questions with her experiment, And those questions,

(11:01):
as they stated in the paper, were does the concentration
of gas in the atmosphere affect is warming response to
the Sun's rays? The other question was does the composition
of the gas in the atmosphere affect is warming response
to the sun rays? And the last question was can
the effect of different gases on the warming response of
the sun rays be ranked? But there were, of course

(11:24):
these limitations to her work. She did, I mean as
we spoke about earlier, like we didn't have the same understanding.
This was still the beginning stages of our understanding about
the greenhouse effect and greenhouse gases and how those things
affected climate change. She was at the forefront of that,
so she didn't answer the how and the why those
gases could raise Earth's temperature. Also, the paper wasn't completely

(11:49):
clear about her scientific methods, about the the details of
the experimentation itself, so there are limitations in our understanding
of what she did because of that. But in August
of eighteen fifty six, her paper was presented at the
tenth Annual Meeting of the a S and she didn't
present it. Joseph Henry did, who was the secretary of

(12:12):
the Smithsonian Institution at the time. Women did speak at
those meetings, but it was uncommon. But yeah, so there
were reports of her work and other journals afterwards, people
talking about her role. UM. According to a later summary
by David A. Wells and the Annual of Scientific Discovery,

(12:32):
Henry had prefaced the presentation of the paper, Henry being
the guy who presented it at the meeting. UM. He
had prefaced the presentation of the paper by saying something
along the lines of science. Was of no country and
of no sex, so it seems like he kind of
hyped up her role as a woman and being able
to do this kind of scientific investigation, and probably most

(12:55):
likely Um needed to do that in order to get
people to listen um and understand the significance of it
and why it was being presented at the time. It's
although it was it wasn't completely clear why he was
the one who presented it like that wasn't explicitly stated,
but likely had something to do. Likely had to do
with the fact that she was a woman. But the

(13:16):
name of that paper was Circumstance Affecting the Heat of
the Sun's Race, and it wasn't published in the conference proceedings.
Neither she nor the presentation were mented in that proceedings
volume that came out of that meaning. But that paper
was published in the American Journal of Science and Arts
that November, and you can actually go look at that online.

(13:39):
It doesn't take very long to read at all. It's
only like a page and a half long, and it
comes right after her husband's paper on the heat in
the Sun's rays. It was published right before and right
after the end of that page. Um, at the very
last page of his paper was hers and the pieces

(14:00):
that covered her afterward, and publications like Scientific American that
didn't bring up that she did this work and that
had been presented mentioned how her work showed that women
could do valid work in scientific inquiry, although they didn't
really talk about the content of the work, which is
I think something that we're very very familiar with, you know,

(14:21):
a lot of ad being made about the gender of
the person when it was women who were doing something,
and much less ado happening about the actual content of
the work. And now that I'm thinking about that, like,
I'm really glad that we have this series doing female
first because that kind of like allows us to high
like that, yes they were women, but like here are
there fabulously intricate stories and significant stories that there's a

(14:46):
bunch of content underneath those headlines. So um, that was
clear in some of the pieces that were written about
her work too. Yeah, I mean it's one of I
don't know the tone, but it does feel kind of like, oh,
look of it a mintary can do, but not talking
about like what she actually did or accomplished, much more like, Okay,

(15:07):
she can do it. And now let's let them in
do their work. So yes, I I also appreciate that
you bring those stories, these stories does and we can
talk about what they did. And Unis she only published
two known papers, but they were the first two physics
papers that were published by a woman in the United States.

(15:29):
The paper, the other paper that she published was just
a year later, in eighteen fifty seven, and that was
called on a New Source of Electrical Excitation. So if
you look up Unis foot story, you'll see that the
fact that she had this first was it was overshadowed
by other men who had done research in the field

(15:52):
very early on. And we're foundational in the history of
modern climate science. So that one of those people was
Irish physicists John Tendall, who is considered a founder of
modern climate science. He has been credited with discovering the
absorption of thermal radiation by carbon dioxide and water vapor.

(16:12):
He announced his discovery in eighteen fifty nine, which was
three years after Foot's eighteen fifty six paper, and in
it he showed that water vapor and gases like carbon
dioxide absorb and emit thermal infrared energy rather than visible sunlight,
which was what Unice Foot did. Her experiment with visible sunlight,

(16:33):
she used sunlight in shade and her experiment which she
put the cylinders in to test the rising of the
temperatures and the cooling of the temperatures in both of
those places. But it wasn't until eighteen sixty one when
Tendel himself suggested that changes in the amounts of water,
vapor and carbon dioxide that we're in the atmosphere could

(16:54):
cause changes in climate. So that's where that link with
those what we now call in house gases. They weren't
calling them that back then, but those changes in the
water vapor um and the carbon dioxide and the carbon
dioxide being a thing that Unice Foot worked with and
that was integraling her getting her first because she linked
it with climate change. Tindall didn't make that link until

(17:18):
eighteen sixty one. He didn't reference Foots work, although he
did called back and credit other people who had done
earlier work in the field. And you know, it didn't
help also that Foot's experiment was not explained comprehensively. It
didn't have illustrations to go along with it. If you
go look at the work, then you'll see that She

(17:39):
did have this graph of the temperatures that she used
in that paper, but she didn't have any illustrations, and
she didn't differentiate between the effect of solar radiation and
the effect of long wave infrared radiation, which is more
of the radiation that we're concerned with when talking about
the greenhouse effect and the effect that the car indo

(18:00):
side has on the atmosphere and climate, and so greenhouse gases,
of which carbon dioxide is one, they let the sun's
light shine onto Earth's surface, but then they also trapped
the heat that's radiated by Earth back up into the atmosphere,
and that whole process, what we now call the greenhouse effect,

(18:22):
is what keeps the planet's climate comfortable, which is why
this is such a big conversation right now. And the
fact that the amounts of carbon dioxide that we're emitting
through the all these huge industrial economic processes that we
have as a human species on the Earth, and how
the rising amounts of carbon dioxide meant into the atmosphere

(18:45):
affect the climate change um and has led to the
process that we now call global warming. So that's all
that all her work ties into that. But even though
she didn't make a distinction between solar radiation and radiate
heat from the Earth. She does seem to have been
the first person to notice how carbon dioxide and water

(19:06):
vapor together absorb heat and to then from there to
make the direct link between changes in these things and
changes in climate. So there are some sources, including a
twenty nineteen paper by scientists Roland Jackson, that say that
it's likely that Tindall was unaware of Foots work. He

(19:27):
didn't know about it. He wasn't interested in climate change.
Jackson says it wasn't the main focus of his work,
but that others in hindsight have dubbed him a father
of climate science, but he wasn't the one who put
that title on himself, and Jackson um in that paper
asserted that there were several things that were to account

(19:49):
for her work getting little recognition at the time. That
included a coherent scientific community, let alone one in the
physics field was just urgeining in the US, it was
just forming. Communication with Europe was shoddy, it wasn't great,
so there were things that got lost in translation across
the Atlantic. She was an amateur scientist without extensive formal training,

(20:14):
and she was a woman at a time when many
people view women as incompetent or less capable in science,
and they didn't have much opportunity to join scientific communities,
are published in scientific journals. So those are some of
the reasons that Jackson and other people who are more
on the stance of like, it probably was just the
case that Tendall didn't know about it. He didn't see

(20:34):
the work, So it's not like he was purposefully snubbing
her or discrediting her work. He just didn't know. But
there are other people who do think that Tendall had
to be aware of her work. He was working in
the field. Uh, So he was a researcher who looked
to other people to be able to complete his own
work and add on to theirs, as he noted in

(20:57):
some of the credits that he gave to others, and
and her work. Foots work was republished in some European journals,
and because it was a kind of a known thing
that Tendal view women as intellectually inferior to men. So
there are views on both sides, but overall, like, I'm
definitely not the one to make the judgment of what happened,

(21:18):
and I'm not sure if anybody could ever make that
determination if we don't find something directly from Tindal that if,
I mean, it would how scandalous would it be if
we did, like dig up some letter from Tendal to
some other huge scientists be like, yeah, I heard of
that foot girl. You know, we got his word of
some of her papers over here in these journals. But

(21:39):
you know, I'm not even gonna try to do a
British accent. But she's just a silly American and she's
just a woman, And what does she know she's talking about.
She doesn't even she hasn't even gone to school for this.
So I mean, that would be scandalous and a great,
great historical thing to find if you're you know, into
you know, that kind of shade. But otherwise I don't

(22:00):
think that, you know, there's a way um to fully
know if we don't get those words from Tindal himself.
But at the end of the day, it's important to
view it holistically in terms of like, yes, there were
legitimate um limitations too, maybe two Tindal's ability to have

(22:21):
access to it, and perhaps from his own shortcomings of
maybe he did see it and just skipped over it.
Knowing it was a woman's work. And then there are
you know, legitimate claims to the other side that he
had to be aware of it. So all these things
can be true and should be taken into consideration when
thinking about that and generally the way that we view

(22:41):
women's contributions to history when something, especially when an achievement
has already been so heavily contributed to a prominent man
in a field. Um. So yeah, that was the hole
in sum of Unit's foots work. Like I said, there
wasn't much else that really made waves in her scientific

(23:02):
inquiry and how that affected the community at least that
people know of. Um. But she also fouled patents for
invention inventions, and her husband also fouled at least one
for something that she invented, which was a thermostatically controlled
cooking stove. She died in September of eight. There are
no photos of her, but there has been a growing

(23:25):
interest in her work and contributions to scientific thought once
people began rediscovering it in the last couple of decades,
and there were twenty of century scholars who noted her work,
and in twenty eleven, a petroleum geologist named Ray Sorenson
wrote about coming across her work in a journal called
Search and Discovery, and since then there's been an up

(23:47):
taking interest in her work and more papers, more presentations
and exhibitions, and even a short film call Units that
was released in twenty eighteen about her. So that is
the whole and some of some of what we know
about uniceitz life in her scientific work, and and like

(24:19):
I said, it was a great story. And as you
kind of alluded to, most of the results I found
at first when I was looking into her were like
how much did she really do? Did this guy take
all that credit? Like all of this like argument that's
happening around her to this day, and a lot of
people saying like, yes, we've just discovered her, are rediscovered

(24:42):
her work, and which I find fascinating that there's like
still this scientific debate about what she did. And also
kudos to you Ease for your scientific explanation, because I
saw I read the paper and I was like, oh,
let you handle that one, So thank you. This is

(25:02):
from my personal limited knowledge of things like this too.
I mean, I know that there are scientists and physicists
out there who can talk more deeply about it, but
I think, um, it's like just as impactful and meaningful
to even know a little bit about the surface, because
I think that's how we generally go a lot around
in our lives, like we don't know everything about every field.

(25:23):
But yeah, I think, um that I am glad that
this quote unquote rediscovery is happening, but also want to
just acknowledge the fact that like these people, of course,
grateful to them to bring her back into light, but
like people who are finding her work in twenty eleven,
they're not the first ones to know about her work,

(25:45):
like there were other people, other women before before them,
who were talking about her work and publishing her story
in different places. Always a good note. But yeah, I,
like I said to it's just with everything that's going on,
this is so important to talk about, um, And I'm

(26:05):
glad that you brought this brought this story to us.
And now that there's actually a movie already, I'm gonna
have to go watch it since I can't say this
movie it's very short. The film is very short. It's
like eleven minutes long. Okay, let's go. I love So

(26:34):
I do have to say I understand and appreciate why
you didn't do a dramatic British like reenactment, Eves. But
now I'm going to miss that for the rest of
my life. I would love if someone would do it.
To be honest with you, I'll do it, not with Mike.
I love doing those Are those are trapping orders to tread? Yes?

(26:56):
I agree? I agree? Well, I look forwards and I
look forward to having you again on here. It's always
such a pleasure. Where can the good listeners find you?
You can find me on many other episodes of Female
First right here on Sminthy featuring a lot of other
people who have other inventions and accomplishments and achievements and

(27:22):
cool and interesting things that they did in history. So
go back and listen to that. There are like over
twenty episodes um of Female First. Also, you can find
me on Instagram at not Apologizing. You can find me
on Twitter at Eves Jeff co and everything else. You
can just find on eve jeffc dot com. And you
should be able to dig anything else up through there

(27:44):
or hit me up through there. Yes, yes, yes, And
if you would like to contact us listeners, you can
or emails stuff to your mom stuff at I hired
me to dot com. You can find us on Twitter
at mom Stuff Podcasts or on Instagram at Stuff I
Ever Told You. Thanks as always to our super producer Christina,
Thank you, and thanks to you for listening Stuff I
Never Told You. The protection of I Heart Radio from
more podcast in My Heart Radio, you can listen to
their heardio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to

(28:06):
your favorite shows.

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