In August 1856, the American Association for the Advancement of Science met in Albany, New York. One of the papers presented that week was called “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays.” The author, Eunice Newton Foote, was not in the room. Women could not present at AAAS, so Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian read it for her. Three years later, the Irish physicist John Tyndall published a more elaborate version of the same idea and became, in every textbook since, the discoverer of the greenhouse effect.

Foote’s experiment was almost embarrassingly simple. She took two identical glass cylinders, fitted each with a thermometer, and pumped them full of different gases: ordinary air, hydrogen, oxygen, carbon dioxide, water vapor. She set them in sunlight, then in shade, and recorded how fast each warmed up and how slowly each cooled. Carbon dioxide warmed the most and held its heat the longest. Water vapor came second.

The paragraph that should have made her famous was the one she added at the end. If the atmosphere had once contained more carbon dioxide, she wrote, the planet would have been warmer, and “an increased temperature from its own action as well as from increased weight must have necessarily resulted.” That is the greenhouse effect, stated plainly, in 1856.

Tyndall’s 1859 work was better. He used a ratio spectrophotometer of his own design, measured infrared absorption rather than total heating, and identified the specific bands at which CO2 and water vapor trap heat. He was a professional physicist with a Royal Institution lab. Foote was an amateur working at home in Seneca Falls, with no university affiliation and no obvious way to follow up. Tyndall almost certainly did not know about her paper, although the question of whether he should have is still argued by historians.

Foote was rediscovered in 2010, when a retired petroleum geologist named Raymond Sorenson came across her paper in a bound volume of nineteenth-century proceedings and recognized what it was. She had also, separately, signed the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments alongside Elizabeth Cady Stanton, which is the document that launched the American women’s suffrage movement. Two firsts in one life, both buried for over a century.

The lesson is not that Tyndall stole the idea. He did not. The lesson is how easily a correct, important, fully-published result can vanish when the person who produced it does not have the institutional standing to defend it.

Learn more: Sorenson, Raymond P., “Eunice Foote’s Pioneering Research on CO2 and Climate Warming,” AAPG Search and Discovery Article #70092 (2011). Foote’s original paper, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays,” American Journal of Science and Arts, Vol. XXII, November 1856: https://archive.org/details/mobot31753002152491/page/382/