SYMHC Classics: Eunice Newton Foote

This 2021 episode covers Eunice Newton Foote, who became the first person to make a connection between the Earth’s temperature and the concentration of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere in 1856. 

 

 

 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
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

(00:22):
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

(00:42):
like extreme weather and sea level rise. So for today's
Saturday Classic, we are replaying our episode on Unice Newton Foot,
the first scientists known to make a connection between greenhouse
gases like carbon dioxide and a warming climate. She did
this almost one hundred and seventy years ago in eighteen
fifty six, and this episode originally came out on September eighth,

(01:06):
twenty twenty one. Here about to write us an email
thing that we only care about the climate during the
Trump administration Joe Biden was president. Then Welcome to Stuff
You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello,

(01:30):
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and
I'm Holly Frye. We have done various episodes related to
the environment on the show before, so things like the
Donor smog and the Cuyahoga River fires and the London
smog of nineteen fifty two. We talked about extinctions in
our twenty eighteen episode on endlings, and about invasive species

(01:52):
in our episode on Australia's rabbit Proof Fence, and then
in more recent times in our episode on Kudzuo 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.

(02:12):
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, and we've talked about ways different
scientists have measured various aspects of the climate a little bit. Yeah,

(02:33):
some of that has come up in unearthed. Yeah, not
climate itself specifically, 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.
Unice Newton foot and in eighteen fifty six she became
the first person to make a connection between the Earth's

(02:55):
temperature and the concentration of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere.
That credit, though, usually goes to John Tendall, who made
the same connection a few years later. Eunice Newton was
born in Goshen, Connecticut, on July seventeenth, eighteen nineteen, and
she was baptized on September twenty ninth of that year.

(03:16):
Her father's name was Isaac Newton Junior, which is a
delightful coincidence considering Eunice's path in life, and her mother's
name was Thursa, and Eunice was the eleventh of their
twelve children. Isaac not a scientist or a philosopher, but
a farmer, and although he seems to have been very
successful at this, he also liked to invest in various

(03:40):
business ventures, and these did not always work out, and
by the time he died in eighteen thirty five, he
was deeply in debt. Sometime after Eunice was born, but
well before her father's death, the family moved to East Bloomfield,
New York, and that's where Unice'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

(04:02):
in eighteen thirty six, when she was about seventeen, she
enrolled at Troy Female Seminary that later became known as
the Emma Willard School after its founder. It's possible that
Unice left journals, correspondents, 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.

(04:22):
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.
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 women's school at the time. Emma
Willard corresponded and collaborated with Amice Eaton, who was co

(04:46):
founder of the Rensalier School that's now Rensalier Polytechnic Institute
that was about seven miles or eleven kilometers away from Troy.
Eaton was a natural scientist and an educational reformer, and
his reform included a focus on learning by doing rather
than focusing on memorization. So Willard's curriculum for the Women's

(05:07):
Seminary incorporated a lot of these ideas. So Eunice would
not only have attended lecturers on the scientists, she also
would have learned about designing and conducting experiments as part
of scientific study. It's also possible that Unice's time at
the seminary influenced a connection that would happen later in
her life. Eunice was at the seminary from eighteen thirty

(05:29):
six to eighteen thirty eight, and later on she would
live near and work with Elizabeth Katie Stanton, who graduated
from Troy Female Seminary in eighteen thirty two. So it
is possible, but not really documented anywhere, that these two
women fell to connection thanks to their having gone to
the same school. On August twelfth, eighteen forty one, when

(05:50):
Unice was twenty two, she married Elisha Foote, who was
about ten years older than she was. After their marriage,
they moved to Seneca Falls, New York, also home to
Alizabeth Katy Stanton. At one point, Elisha actually bought the
home that's known today as the Elizabeth Katy Stanton House,
although it doesn't look like the Foots ever lived in

(06:11):
that house. Both of Eunice and Elishah's children were born
in Seneca Falls, and those were Mary, who was born
on July twenty first of eighteen forty two, and Augusta,
who was born October twenty fourth, eighteen forty four. In
eighteen forty eight, while living in Seneca Falls, both Eunice
and Elisha were involved with the women's rights movement and

(06:32):
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,

(06:53):
Harriet Katy Eaton, Margaret Pryor, and Elizabeth Katy Stanton. Again,
we don't have a lot of person 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. While living in Seneca Falls,
Unice became a member of the American Art Union, which

(07:14):
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. Eventually, the Foots
moved from Seneca Falls to Saratoga Springs, New York. And
regardless of where they lived, both Elisha and Unis seem
to have both been really interested in experiments and inventions.

(07:37):
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 eighteen fifty six, which is where we
are at chronologically in this story. But we're going to
have a lengthier discussion of Unice's scientific work later, so

(08:00):
for now we will move on to the rest of
what we know about her life. In addition to their
published scientific work, both Elisha and Unice applied for and
were granted multiple patents. Unice'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

(08:23):
issued in eighteen sixty. Later, she developed a paper making machine.
According to a favorable writeup of this machine in the
Boston Post in eighteen sixty four, one Massachusetts paper maker
that put this invention into use was saving one hundred
and fifty seven dollars a day in materials, which would
have been a significant amount. In eighteen sixty four, that

(08:45):
same article suggested that wrapping and printing papers that were
made using this method would cost two or three cents
less per pound than other paper did. 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.

(09:07):
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 US Supreme Court
in Silsby versus Foot. 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 Foot's patent was granted.

(09:31):
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 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

(09:51):
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 eighteen sixty four, though,
Elijah was appointed to the US Patent Office Board of Appeals,
and then in eighteen sixty eight he became the eleventh
Commissioner of Patents for the United States. His work at

(10:12):
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 Unice went with him,
but we do know that Unis did at least visit
On April sixteenth, eighteen sixty eight, Susan B. Anthony's newspaper,

(10:34):
The Revolution, published a piece by Elizabeth Katie Stanton which
recounted a trip to Washington, d c. It read, in part,
quote Judge Foot 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,

(10:56):
but merely that we might have it in our power
to refute the assertion of the Reverend doctor Todd, trepanned
by Gail Hamilton, who, in his recent attack on his
fair countrywomen, said that there had been no inventors among
our sex. And there we found many witnesses against the
unhappy Todd. Missus Unicefoot has herself taken out several patents

(11:18):
and is occupied at this time making a new kind
of paper. But later Stanton went on to say, quote
Missus Foot 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

(11:39):
to investigate this matter for himself, he will no doubt
find this to be true. Elisha was the Commissioner of
Patents for a little less than a year until April
of eighteen sixty nine, and then he returned to his
private law practice. By the late eighteen seventies, he and
Unice had moved to Saint Louis to live with their
daughter Mary, who had married John B. Henderson. Henderson had

(12:03):
served as the US Senator for Missouri from eighteen sixty
two to eighteen sixty nine and was co author of
the thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which outlawed slavery
accept as punishment for a crime. 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.

(12:23):
So this whole stretch, you know, has happened over a
period of time that included the US 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

(12:46):
against slavery in this context, but not something that's particularly
written down anywhere. Yeah, one would hope, But as we
know today, not everyone in a family feels the same way. Yeah,
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

(13:08):
Civil War started. Anyway. To return to the story, Elijah
died of heart disease at the Henderson home on October
twenty second, eighteen eighty three, and Eunice's life after that
point is pretty much a mystery. She died on September thirtieth,
eighteen eighty eight, in Lenox, Massachusetts, at the age of
sixty nine. Both she and Elijah were interred in the

(13:30):
Foot Family Mausoleum in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.
According to a nineteen fifteen 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 Unice survives,

(13:51):
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. The American Association for the Advancement
of Science was established in Boston in eighteen forty seven,

(14:13):
and it held its first meeting in Philadelphia in eighteen
forty eight. 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. In terms of its membership, in
those early years, there were no strict criteria. Anyone who

(14:34):
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 lists who were not

(14:54):
paying dues and weren't really active anymore. That 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. Elishah Foote was elected to the American
Association for the Advancement of Science at its tenth meeting,
which was held in Albany, New York, in August of

(15:14):
eighteen fifty six, 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 twenty second,
but some accounts place that is happening on the twenty third.
Unice's paper is listed in the program immediately after Elishah's

(15:35):
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 Triple As. Although the program that was printed
ahead of the meeting shows both of the Foot's papers
with the same title, when Unices was printed later, it
was with the title Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the

(15:58):
Sun's Rays 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 eighteen fifty six
Triple As 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

(16:22):
me that that was a list in there, and that
there were seventy six papers on it, which just feels
like a lot. It's tricky to tell how that number
of seventy six 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

(16:42):
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 twenty two
of the American Journal of Science and Arts that was
in November of eighteen fifty six. Each of the papers

(17:02):
was noted as having been read at the TRIPAAS meetings.
So it's just kind of a mystery exactly what went
on in terms of the proceedings. Given their similar subject
matter and some common elements in their methods, it's likely
that Elisha and Unice collaborated with one another on their
experiments and their papers. Elisha's used a variety of setups

(17:25):
to compare the ambient temperature to the temperature that the
thermometer recorded when it was placed in the sun, measuring
what he called the quote 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. Unice's experiment looked at how the

(17:46):
heat of the sun affected different gases. In her words quote,
the experiments were made with an air pump and two
cylindrical receivers of the same size, about four inches in
diameter and thirty in length in ea. Each were placed
two thermometers, and the air was exhausted from one and
condensed in the other. After both had acquired the same temperature,

(18:08):
they were placed in the sun side by side, and
while the action of the Sun's rays rose to one
hundred and ten degrees in the condensed tube, it attained
only eighty eight degrees in the other. She concluded in
this part of the paper that quote this circumstance must
affect the power of the Sun's raised in different places
and contribute to their feeble action on the summits of

(18:29):
lofty mountains. She doesn't specify what these cylinders were made of,
but they were presumably glass. Unus 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.

(18:52):
And third, she repeated the same experiment with common air
in one tube and carbonic acid gas, which was the
tester 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 quote the receiver containing the gas became

(19:13):
itself much heated, very sensibly more so than the other,
and on being removed, it was many times as long
in cooling. Foot concluded by saying of the carbonic acid gas, quote,
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

(19:35):
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 one hundred
four degrees, in common air one hundred six degrees, in
oxygen gas one hundred eight degrees, and in carbonic acid

(19:59):
gas one h hundred and twenty five degrees. The significance
of this wasn't really understood at the time, but this
makes Unice 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.
There are a lot of sources that say that Unice

(20:21):
was prohibited from reading this paper at the Triple As
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 Triple As who did not think
women belonged there, but the association did allow women as members.
The first woman to be elected was astronomer Mariah Mitchell
in eighteen fifty. Entomologist Margaretta Morris was elected that same year.

(20:46):
Triple As meetings were open to the public and The
Triple As had issued an open invitation for women to
attend its first meeting in eighteen forty eight, and women
frequently did attend, although again, there were certainly men in
the Triple As who considered women more like companions and
ornaments for the male membership than participants, like active participants

(21:09):
with knowledge and interests of their own. Unice was not
a member of the Triple As, but non members also
presented papers at every Triple As meeting between eighteen forty
eight and eighteen sixty. Strangely, Triple As records of non
member activity don't record any non members presenting in eighteen
fifty six. That may be because Joseph Henry read UNI's

(21:30):
paper for her, or because she was considered to be
covered under her husband's membership. That list also assumes that
non members in question are men, so it also wasn't
unheard of for people's papers to be read by someone
other than the author themselves. At that eighteen fifty six meeting,
Arthur Schott's paper on the geology of the lower Rio

(21:52):
Bravo was read by topographical engineer wh Emery, who was
a major in the US Army. Emory also read marine
tw chandlers on the meteorological phenomena observed at various points
on the boundary survey, and the reasons for Emory reading
these two papers and proxy for someone else that's not

(22:13):
really noted anywhere. So it's possible that the organizers of
the Triple As meeting in eighteen fifty six prevented Unis
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 Triple As
at this point suggests that there may have been some
other explanation. Foot is the only woman known to have

(22:37):
presented a paper that year, even though it was presented
by proxy, 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

(22:59):
women's roles in science, Although there's no word for word
transcript of what these remarks were anywhere. They were summarized
in an eighteen fifty seven 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

(23:21):
eighteen fifty seven, 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,

(23:46):
notes on the progress of science during the year eighteen
fifty six, etc. This a zippy one, just rolls off
the tongue. I got almost to the end of the
list of subjects before I had to take a breath.
Before summarizing the content of Foot's paper, Wells characterized Henry's
comments this way quote. Professor Henry then read a paper

(24:08):
by Missus 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. If Eunice
Newton Foot was indeed prohibited from reading her own paper
in the eighteen fifty six Triple As meeting, that prohibition

(24:29):
seems to have been lifted the next year, eighteen fifty seven.
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 fourteenth, and there is no notation in
the program that would suggest that she did not read

(24:50):
it herself, although there's another report that suggests that she
was introduced again by Joseph Henry. This second paper documented
an experiment she had done over the cour 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. There are

(25:13):
only two physics papers known to have been written by
women and published in American journals prior to eighteen eighty nine,
and they are these two papers by Eunice Newton Foot.
She also wrote two of the only sixteen physics papers
known who have been published by American women in the
entire nineteenth century. Also in eighteen fifty nine, after ongoing

(25:38):
discussion with the Triple As about women's roles in the organization.
This statement was printed in the proceedings of its thirteenth meeting, quote,
no action is necessary in regard to the motion to
admit ladies as members, inasmuch as two ladies have already
been admitted. It's not clear whether that motion that's referenced
was made and addressed before or after a name ducator

(26:00):
and scientist Elmira 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 Triple As members before eighteen sixty, although since many
people on the member list included only their initials, there
might have been others. We'll talk about how Eunice Newton

(26:21):
Foot's papers were received and their impact after another quick
sponsor break. After Joseph Henry read Eunice Newton Foot's paper
at the eighteen fifty six meeting of the Triple As,

(26:43):
it got some attention in both the United States and
Europe in both popular and scientific journals. As we said earlier,
both the Foot's papers were published in full in the
American Journal of Science and Arts and David A. Wells
Annual of Scientific Discovery paraphrase both of their papers, as
well as Henry's introductory remarks of Unice's paper. Even though

(27:05):
Unice's paper is much shorter than her husband's, his synopsis
of Unices a little longer than the one of her
husband's is Perhaps she was so succinct he felt he
needed to, like, really make sure people understood. The September
eighteen fifty six issue of Scientific American included an article

(27:27):
titled Scientific Lady's Experiments with Condensed Gases. It commented on
women's participation in science, reading in part quote, 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

(27:49):
ability to investigate and observe correctly as men. This article
then described Foot's experiments and her conclusions before dipping a
toe into a debate that was going on at the
time between the plutinists and the neptunists. Briefly, plutinists argued
that the Earth had previously been molten and that rocks

(28:10):
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

(28:31):
author of this Scientific American article contended that Foot'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. This piece ended by saying, quote,
the columns of the Scientific American have been oftentimes graced

(28:53):
with articles on scientific subjects by ladies, which would do
honor to men of the highest scientific reputation, And the
experiments of Missus Foot afford abundant evidence of the ability
of woman to investigate any subject with originality and precision.
The October eighteen fifty six edition of United States magazine

(29:15):
was overall not as flattering as that was. Its article
Science and Savins in America, which was written under the
pen name Anthroposts, covered the eighteen fifty six Triple As Meeting,
noting that no women or people of color were included
in the organization's membership list. It's not clear what whoever

(29:35):
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 Foot and Mitchell were both
considered to be members, while not mentioning Morris at all.
This article mentions Henry reading Foot's paper and quote apologizing

(29:58):
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 countrywomen can
be found who give any attention to science as amateurs.
Pardon the solicism or investigators. It is this fact that

(30:20):
needs either explanation or apology. 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

(30:43):
participation in science. But it does not do that. Instead
it becomes insulting, saying, quote, we could not help asking ourselves,
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 their richest lace on the side seats,

(31:04):
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 tapists before a
scientific body, the results of their investigations, discoveries and deductions
in the common world of matter and mind, which, with
them we jointly inhabit. It started so good and then

(31:28):
it lands Why are you so dingy? Women? I really thought.
As I started reading it, I was like, ah, man,
I really think this is gonna be talking a lot about,
like why there weren't women and people of color and
involved in this mort No, it just became a bunch
of sexist insils. Nice. A summary of the eighteen fifty

(31:49):
six 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 Unus's paper, but makes there's
no mention of her husband's. The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal
for eighteen fifty seven summarizes Unus's paper as well, but
since it also mentions Elisha's work, it's a little unclear

(32:11):
which of them the journal is attributing the experiment to.
The German journal Yadiz Beicht printed a summary of it
as well, which was dated eighteen fifty six, although that
actually came out in eighteen fifty seven. Then, on May eighteenth,
eighteen fifty nine, Irish physicist John Tendall made a similar
observation to Eunice Newton Foots about the ability of water,

(32:33):
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 Medias Poulet for having done earlier related work. And
there's been some discussion about whether Tendall knew about Eunice

(32:54):
Newton Foot'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 twenty nineteen argues that
he probably did not. That this omission is more about
the state of scientific communication across the Atlantic in the
mid nineteenth century. He speculates that Tendall just wouldn't have

(33:17):
been likely to have read any of the journals or
other publications that referenced Foot's work prior to his own observations.
Tyndall's experimental setup was more sophisticated than Foots was, but
unlike her, he did not make the connection between these
gases and the Earth's climate until later in his work.
In eighteen sixty one, he did some research that showed

(33:38):
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. The first paper to really quantify the
carbon dioxide concentrations involved in the greenhouse gas effect was

(34:02):
published by Swedish scientists Vante august arian Has in eighteen
ninety six. His later work also suggests that the burning
of fossil fuels contributes to this process. About ten years
after Tyndall published his work on this, he and Joseph
Henry became acquainted, but there's no suggestion that the two
of them ever talked about Foot's work and how it

(34:24):
related to Tindall's. However, there were other people who cited
Eunice Newton Foot's work later on in the nineteenth century.
For example, Ethan Samuel Chapin's eighteen eighty eight book Gravitation
The Determining Force references Henry's reading of Foots paper at
the Triple As in a section on conditions likely to
affect the temperature of the Moon's surface. This section of

(34:47):
the book discusses matter on the Moon and how different
densities of that matter must have different capabilities for retaining heat.
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 Tendall, not Eunice Newtonfoot, is often

(35:12):
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 twenty eleven, when Raymond Sorensen
published Unice Foots pioneering research on CO two and Climate
warming that was published in the American Association of Petroleum
Geologist Search and Discovery. Sorenson had stumbled across that summary

(35:37):
of Foot's paper that was in the eighteen fifty seven
Annual of Scientific Discovery and had realized its significance. There
was even less publicly available information about Eunice Newtonfoot in
twenty eleven than there is today. Not even the text
of her paper had been unearthed at that point. Sorenson
updated his paper in twenty eighteen to note that a

(35:58):
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. This update also clarified
that it was Foot herself who made the connection between
carbon dioxide gas and the Earth's climate and the climate

(36:20):
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. However, we should
note that claims that Eunice Newton Foot was totally forgotten
until Raymond Sorenson published his twenty eleven paper are not

(36:43):
really accurate. Sorenson does seem to have been the first
person to directly point out that Foot was the first
person to observe something that Tyndall got the credit for,
but Sally Gregory Colstead's The Formation of the American Scientific
Community the American Association for the Advancement of Science eighteen
forty eight to eighteen sixty was published by the University

(37:05):
of Illinois Press in nineteen seventy six, and it mentions
Foot delivering her paper on electrical excitation in eighteen fifty seven.
In addition to that information on Foot that's found at
ancestry dot com also includes a scan of a nineteen
seventy six letter from Deborah Dean Warner, who was then

(37:25):
Curator of the History of Physical Sciences at the Smithsonian,
to doctor Judith Wellman at State University of New York.
Warner and Wellman had talked about Foot at the National
Archives Conference on Women's History. According to this letter, and
the letter mentions both of Foot's papers and their titles.
Warner's Science Education for Women in Antebellum America, published in

(37:49):
the journal Isis, a Journal of the History of Science
Society in nineteen seventy eight, also cites both of Foot's papers.
Wellman's The Road to Seneca Falls elizabethaid Haitie Stanton in
the First Women's Rights Convention, which was published in two
thousand and four, also mentions both paper's existence but not
their subjects. And Lois Arnold's Four Lives in Science Women's

(38:12):
Education in the Nineteenth Century, which was published in nineteen
eighty four, mentions Foot's article on the heat from the
Sun's rays, using the eighteen fifty six Scientific American article
as its source on that. So there were various folks
who were definitely talking about Eunice Newtonfoot and other contexts
before that twenty eleven Weever came out. There's also a

(38:33):
short film on Unice Newton Foot called Unice and that
was released in twenty eighteen and it is available on YouTube.
That's a Unice Newton Foot. Thanks so much for joining
us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us
a note our email addresses, History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot

(38:54):
com and you can subscribe to the show on the
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your favorite shows. MHM