Eunice Newton Foote

Eunice Newton Foote (born Eunice Newton; July 17, 1819 – September 30, 1888) was an American scientist, inventor, and women's rights campaigner. She was the first scientist to identify the insulating effect of certain gases and to posit that therefore rising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels could increase atmospheric temperature and affect climate, a phenomenon now referred to as the greenhouse effect. Born in Connecticut, Foote was raised in New York at the center of social and political movements of her day, such as the abolition of slavery, anti-alcohol activism, and women's rights. She attended the Troy Female Seminary and the Rensselaer School from age 17 to age 19, gaining a broad education in scientific theory and practice.

After marrying attorney Elisha Foote in 1841, Foote settled in Seneca Falls, New York. She was a signatory to the Declaration of Sentiments and one of the editors of the proceedings of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first gathering to treat women's rights as its sole focus. In 1856 she published a paper notable for demonstrating the absorption of heat by CO2 and water vapor and hypothesizing that changing amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere would alter the climate. It was the first known publication in a scientific journal by an American woman in the field of physics. She published a second paper in 1857, on static electricity in atmospheric gases. Although she was not a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), both her papers were read at the organization's annual conferences—these were the only papers in the field of physics to be written by an American woman until 1889. She went on to patent several inventions.

Foote died in 1888 and for almost a hundred years her contributions were unknown, before being rediscovered by women academics in the twentieth century. In the twenty-first century, new interest in Foote arose when it was realized that her work predated discoveries made by John Tyndall, who had been recognized by scientists as the first person to experimentally show the mechanism of the greenhouse effect involving infrared radiation. Detailed examination of her work by modern scientists has confirmed that three years before Tyndall published his paper in 1859, Foote discovered that water vapor and CO2 absorb heat from sunlight. Furthermore, her view that variances in the atmospheric levels of water vapor and CO2 would result in climate change preceded Tyndall's 1861 publication by five years. Because of the limits of her experimental design, and possibly a lack of knowledge of infrared radiation, Foote did not examine or detect the absorption and emission of radiant energy within the thermal infrared range, which is the cause of the greenhouse effect. In 2022, the American Geophysical Union instituted The Eunice Newton Foote Medal for Earth-Life Science in her honor to recognize outstanding scientific research.