# Eunice Newton Foote: The 1856 Greenhouse Effect Pioneer

*Science & Technology · Priya Nair · 2026-09-16*

## TL;DR

Eunice Newton Foote was an American scientist who showed in 1856 that carbon dioxide traps heat, the first known published description of the greenhouse effect. Her work predated John Tyndall's by three years but was largely forgotten until researchers rediscovered it more than 150 years later.

## Key facts

- Eunice Newton Foote presented her research on heat absorption by gases in 1856 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
- Her experiments used glass cylinders filled with different gases, and she found that carbon dioxide warmed more than ordinary air when exposed to sunlight.
- She speculated that higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would raise Earth's temperature, a conclusion that anticipated modern climate science.
- Her paper was published in the American Journal of Science and Arts in November 1856, but a male colleague presented it on her behalf because women were not permitted to speak at the conference.
- Foote's work remained largely unrecognized until the 21st century, when researchers began to credit her as the first person to link carbon dioxide to atmospheric warming.

## The Woman Who Saw the Greenhouse Effect Before Anyone Was Looking

Eunice Newton Foote was born on July 17, 1819, in Connecticut. She later moved with her family to New York state, and she grew up in a household that did not treat science as a subject reserved for boys. The school she attended was unusually progressive for its era: it let girls walk into the science classroom and stay there. That single door, left open, is where her story starts.

She learned to run experiments with her own hands. Not to read about them secondhand, not to watch a male classmate take the credit. Actually doing the work. By the time she was a young woman, she had the habits of a researcher, the patience for measurement, and a curiosity that would not sit still.

In 1841 she married Elisha Foote, a lawyer who shared her fascination with the natural world. The two of them set up a small laboratory in their own home. Picture it: a domestic room with glassware on the table, sunlight coming through the window, a married couple comparing notes on what they had just measured. They had two daughters, Mary and Augusta, and the house was busy with family life. The science happened anyway.

Then came the question that would outlast almost everyone who read it. Could an atmosphere thick with carbon dioxide hold on to heat in a way that ordinary air does not?

Foote set up two glass cylinders. One held air rich in carbon dioxide. The other held ordinary air, with far less of it. She placed both in sunlight and tracked how their temperatures changed. The carbon-dioxide cylinder heated up more. And after she took it out of the sun, it cooled down more slowly than the other one. She did not stop there. She also compared moist air against dry air, and hydrogen against oxygen, watching how each responded to heat.

The result was not a small technical footnote. It was the first known published recognition that a carbon-dioxide-rich atmosphere would heat up. In 1856, years before anyone else put it in print, Eunice Newton Foote had effectively described the greenhouse effect and raised the possibility of global warming.

She was not a professor. She had no university post, no institutional backing, no laboratory built for her by a wealthy patron. She had a home, a husband who was interested, and a set of glass cylinders.

> The greenhouse effect had a discoverer before it had a famous name. She was an American woman, and she was working from her own house.

That is the part worth sitting with. Long before climate science had a founding story, it had a finding. It just did not yet have the right person attached to it in the public memory.

## Two Glass Cylinders, One Startling Result

Picture a windowsill in a quiet house in New York state, sometime in the early 1850s. Two glass cylinders sit side by side in the sunlight. Inside one, the air is rich in carbon dioxide. Inside the other, the carbon dioxide has been largely drawn out. A thermometer in each tube tells the story no one was expecting.

That was the whole apparatus. No particle accelerators, no spectrometers, no government grant. Eunice Newton Foote placed the cylinders in direct sun, watched the mercury climb, then carried them into the shade and watched it fall. The carbon dioxide-rich cylinder heated more than its twin. When she pulled both from the light, it also cooled more slowly, holding its warmth like a stone wall at dusk.

She did not stop there. Foote ran the same test with moist air against dry air, and with hydrogen against oxygen, tracking how each gas responded to heat. Different gases behaved differently. That was the point.

Her paper drew the conclusion out loud: if the atmosphere held more carbon dioxide, Earth's temperature would rise. She wrote it plainly, in 1856, in a note read before the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The experiment was almost embarrassingly simple. The conclusion was the greenhouse effect, named and described more than a century before climate change became a household phrase. Foote was not guessing at a metaphor. She had measured it, in glass, on a sunny day, with the most ordinary tools a curious mind could gather.

What makes the story sting is the timing. The science was sound. The result was clear. And the world would spend the next 150 years catching up to what those two cylinders already knew.

## Presented by a Man, Published in a Journal, Then Forgotten

In August 1856, the American Association for the Advancement of Science gathered in Albany, New York, and Eunice Newton Foote's paper was on the program. She was not the one who stood up to read it. Because women were not permitted to present at the meeting, Joseph Henry, Secretary of the Smithsonian, delivered her work to the room in her place.

Henry opened by stressing that science should draw no line between men and women. That framing is part of the story as it has come down to us, and the exact wording is not firmly documented, so treat it as reported rather than recorded. What is certain is what he carried to the podium: her glass cylinders, her sunlight readings, her conclusion that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would raise the planet's temperature.

Then came the publication. Her paper appeared in the *American Journal of Science and Arts* in November 1856. The following month, *Scientific American* ran a piece calling attention to her experiments, which means the work did not vanish on the day it was read. It was noticed. It was printed. And then it was set aside.

Her published note was short, roughly a page or so. The frequently repeated figure of one and a half pages is not firmly confirmed, so it is safer to say it was brief. Brief, and buried, even though it contained the first published recognition that an atmosphere heavy with carbon dioxide could overheat.

A room full of scientists heard a woman's discovery read aloud in 1856. The paper was printed that November. And for more than a century afterward, almost no one cited it.

That is the part that should not have happened. The moment had everything it needed: a respected venue, a prestigious presenter, a journal willing to publish, a popular magazine willing to amplify. Recognition was right there in the room. It simply did not attach itself to Eunice Newton Foote.

## John Tyndall, the Man Who Got the Credit

Three years after Eunice Newton Foote's paper appeared, the Irish physicist John Tyndall published his own experiments in 1859 showing that carbon dioxide and water vapor absorb infrared radiation. That is real, careful, more advanced work than anything Foote had the tools to do. Tyndall earned his place.

He is often described as a founder or father of climate science, though that exact title is not universally fixed and gets handed to more than one figure. What he demonstrated was the physics underneath the greenhouse effect: certain gases soak up heat that would otherwise escape. He did not demonstrate global warming itself. He built the instruments that could show and measure the effect, and that apparatus was his signature contribution.

One thing needs clearing up. A popular version of this story claims Tyndall openly argued that women were mentally inferior to men. That is false, and it should not be repeated. Tyndall was generally progressive for his era. The injustice here is not that he stole anything from Foote. The injustice is quieter and harder to fix: her work was never allowed to count in the first place.

Foote's 1856 results drew almost no serious citation or discussion for well over a century. Not a rebuttal, not a dispute, just silence. The scientific conversation simply moved on without her, and when Tyndall's more refined measurements arrived, there was no earlier name left in the room to compete with his.

So two people looked at the same question, one with glass cylinders and sunlight, one with purpose-built detectors. Only one of them got a legacy. That gap, more than any accusation of theft, is what makes **Eunice Newton Foote** worth remembering.

## A Second Paper, a Quiet Life, and a Grave in Brooklyn

Eunice Newton Foote did not stop after the cylinders and the sunlight. In 1857 she brought a second study to the American Association for the Advancement of Science, this time meeting in Montreal, and the subject was electricity. Her question was narrow and strange: does air behave differently, electrically speaking, when you squeeze it or let it expand? The paper came out in 1858 in the *American Journal of Science and Arts*.

That is the shape of a working scientist's life, not a one-hit curiosity. She ran the experiments, wrote them up, sent them out. What the scientific community made of the electricity work is harder to pin down. The record is thin on how it was received and on how much it actually moved the understanding of pressure and electrical charge. She published anyway.

At home, the lab was a shared project. Elisha Foote, the lawyer she married in 1841, specialized in patent law and held patents of his own, including devices built around stoves. The two of them were married for more than forty years. Elisha died in 1883.

Eunice Newton Foote died in the autumn of 1888, at 69. The cause of her death is not definitively known, and accounts of the exact date vary. Her grave is reported to be at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, though that too rests on secondary accounts rather than a firmly confirmed record.

So the woman who first wrote down that a carbon dioxide rich atmosphere would run hot ended her life in ordinary quiet, her biggest idea still sitting uncredited in a back issue. The rediscovery, the auction, the sudden name in the headlines, all of that belonged to a later century. She never saw any of it.

## Rediscovered 150 Years Later

Raymond Sorenson was not a professor, not a climate modeler, not anyone with a lab or a grant. He was an independent researcher who liked to leaf through old scientific books and documents, the kind of paper trail most historians never bother to open. And while he was reading through that material, he came across a record connected to Eunice Newton Foote, a name that meant almost nothing to modern science at the time.

What he found did not fit the story everyone had been telling. Foote's 1856 experiments on carbon dioxide and heat had been published, discussed, and then quietly buried. Sorenson wrote an article about her work around 2011, more than 150 years after those experiments. The piece did not just add a footnote to climate history. It cracked open the whole origin story.

Once that door was open, it stayed open. Researchers went back to the archives. Journalists picked up the thread. Foote's life, her two glass cylinders, her paper on electricity, all of it started circulating again, and a woman who had been erased from the record for over a century became a name people actually knew.

The rediscovery also fed a wider reckoning. Foote is now one of the clearest examples of how women's contributions to science were sidelined, and her case has pushed scholars to look harder at who else got written out of climate science history. As the story goes, a 2019 Sotheby's auction put one of the early editions of her article on the block, reportedly estimated at $2,000 to $3,000 and said to have sold for $4,750. Those figures have not been independently verified. Even so, the symbolic weight was hard to miss: a paper that once vanished into a journal's back pages was suddenly worth bidding on.


## Frequently asked questions

**Who was Eunice Newton Foote and what did she discover?**

Eunice Newton Foote was an American scientist born on July 17, 1819, in Connecticut. In 1856 she became the first person to publish the idea that an atmosphere rich in carbon dioxide would trap heat and raise temperatures, laying early groundwork for what we now call the greenhouse effect.

**What did her 1856 experiment actually prove?**

Foote placed two glass cylinders in sunlight: one filled with air high in carbon dioxide, the other with ordinary air. The CO2-rich cylinder grew hotter and cooled more slowly. She also compared moist and dry air, and hydrogen against oxygen, showing that different gases respond differently to heat.

**Why is John Tyndall credited instead of her?**

Tyndall's 1859 paper demonstrated that carbon dioxide and water vapor absorb infrared radiation, and his more advanced instruments cemented his reputation. Foote published three years earlier, in November 1856, but her brief note drew little sustained attention while Tyndall's rigorous work became the standard reference.

**Was she the first person to discover global warming?**

Foote's 1856 paper is widely regarded as the first published recognition that higher carbon dioxide concentrations would raise atmospheric temperature. She did not measure actual global warming, but she was the first to connect rising CO2 to a warmer planet in print.

**Why was her work ignored for over 150 years?**

Her findings went largely uncited until the 21st century, a gap of more than 150 years. Women were barred from presenting at scientific meetings in her era, and her short article never entered the mainstream climate narrative that formed around Tyndall and later researchers.

**How was she rediscovered in the 21st century?**

Independent researcher Raymond Sorenson found Foote's work while examining old scientific books and documents, and he published an article about her in 2011. That rediscovery sparked fresh scholarly interest in her life and contributions, restoring her place in climate science history.

**Did she present her own research at the 1856 meeting?**

No. Her paper was read at the August 1856 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Albany, New York, but Joseph Henry, Secretary of the Smithsonian, presented it on her behalf because women were not permitted to present at the time. Editorial note: Details that remain unconfirmed by the historical record are presented here as such, and readers should treat any uncertain points with appropriate caution.

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