Eunice Newton Foote

Eunice Newton was born in Connecticut in 1819 and grew up in New York State, where she attended the Troy Female Seminary, one of the few schools that taught girls chemistry and physics with real apparatus. She married Elisha Foote, a judge and inventor, and in 1848 she was at the Seneca Falls convention on women's rights, where she signed the declaration and helped prepare its proceedings for publication.

She was also, in a way that was possible then for a well-off woman with a sympathetic husband, an experimenter. In 1856 she filled glass cylinders with different gases, placed them in the sun and in shade, and measured the temperature with thermometers. The cylinder with carbon dioxide grew hottest and cooled slowest. She wrote that an atmosphere with more of that gas would give the Earth a higher temperature, and that this might have happened in the geological past.

The paper was presented at the American Association for the Advancement of Science that August. She did not read it herself; Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian did, remarking that science was of no country and no sex. It was reported in the press, then dropped out of view. Three years later John Tyndall in London, working with far better equipment, published his own experiments on the same effect and is usually named as its discoverer. There is no evidence that he had read her.

She published one more physics paper and died in 1888. A retired geologist rediscovered her work in 2011.