In recent years, great concern about the climate has arisen throughout the world, motivated in large part by the increasingly frequent extreme weather events, as well as by the notable increase in temperature.
What is even more worrying is that scientific data has pointed to the human being as the cause behind all these phenomena that threaten us. This fact, as well as the silent way in which it endangers our lives, is what has mobilized people from very different countries so intensely, as shown, for example, by the international movement Fridays for Future. Many movements similar to this one started a few decades ago, when the hole in the ozone layer and the greenhouse effect were widely reported by the media.
However, very few people know that one of the main ingredients of this climate change, the greenhouse effect, was actually discovered by a woman: Eunice Foote.
The first steps of a scientist amateur
Eunice Foote was born in 1819 in Goshen (Connecticut, United States) into a humble family; her father was a simple farmer. Despite not having higher education, her parents wanted her daughter to also receive scientific training and sent her to an institute, the Troy Female Seminary. There she was able to learn chemistry and biology, mainly with an experimental approach, for two years.
This was undoubtedly the germ of a facet of her character that would mark her entire life: she never lost her curiosity and continued to be what we would today call an amateur scientist.
In addition, Eunice Foote had a strong character and well-defined convictions: she believed that women also had the right to be as free as men and to receive a higher education. This is what pushed her, along with her husband Elisha Foote, a statistician and judge, to sign one of the first women’s rights conventions in the world in 1848 in New York: Seneca Falls. Just two years later, she made the biggest (known) discovery of her career: the greenhouse effect.
a home experiment
Thus, in 1850 in a laboratory in his own home, he performed the following experiment. He introduced different gases (common air, hydrogen and CO₂) in closed containers. Inside these containers there was also a thermometer to measure the temperature inside.
He then exposed these gases to sunlight and observed the temperature changes. Thus, he discovered that not all gases are heated in the same way. CO₂ seemed to absorb the most heat.
He also noted that humidity is another crucial factor for heating (the more humid, the more heat is absorbed). It is known that there is a direct relationship between temperature and the microscopic movement of particles: the higher the temperature of a gas, the more its particles move. Therefore, the air molecules are capable of absorbing the incoming heat, transforming it into molecular movement.
Eunice’s was a fairly simple experiment that can easily be done at home. In fact, figure 1, corresponding to a similar experiment carried out by the authors of this article during the European Researchers’ Night 2018, shows how the temperature measured in containers with CO₂ inside increases more than in those that only have air. .
Repercussions of the discovery
Despite their simplicity, the results of his experiment have profound consequences. Eunice quickly realized the implications of her results, as from her scientific training she knew that the composition of the atmosphere has been changing over time. Therefore, the temperature of the atmosphere must also have changed. Furthermore, if the composition of CO₂ in the atmosphere changed in the future, the climate would also change.
What the researcher did not know is that, in reality, above her head (or below her feet), there was a living example of her discovery: Venus.
Venus is not the closest planet to the Sun in our solar system, but it is nonetheless the one with the highest atmospheric temperature. This is due to the thick atmosphere, with terrifying colossal clouds of CO₂ and even sulfuric acid.
Despite this Dantesque image that it has today, it is believed that in the past Venus was quite similar to our peaceful planet: a habitable place. Something terrible happened in its past history that made it become this hell that it is today: Venus is nothing more than an alarm signal in our skies that tells us how things can be if we are not responsible enough for our actions.
A woman in a world of men
Despite this huge discovery, Eunice Foote was not a professional scientist and, what is worse, she was a woman in a century in which women were not taken seriously. For this reason, a colleague of hers, Joseph Henry, from the Smithsonian Institution, was the one who presented her research – published under the title Circumstances that affect the heat of the sun’s rays– at the conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1856.
Henry was very impressed by his study, which he considered to be of higher quality than the others presented at the conference, and decided to add a preface to the research: “Science belongs to neither country nor gender. The sphere of woman encompasses not only the beautiful and the useful, but also the true. However, perhaps because it was a female work after all, it was not even published in the conference abstract.
As if that were not enough, a year later, John Tyndall, who was a professional scientist and therefore had much more means to do these experiments, published a paper in which he reached the same conclusions as Eunice.
It is not yet clear if he was aware of Eunice’s research, it is quite possible that he was not, but what is known for sure is that he did not quote her. The work of the American then fell into oblivion and John Tyndall went down in history as the first person to discover the greenhouse effect.
However, history itself had reserved a better place for Eunice Foote than the drawer of memories. In 2010 Eunice’s work was recovered and with it a fact was revealed: it had been Eunice, a woman, the first person to discover it.
Eunice Foote’s name in the 21st century
More than 10 years have passed since that rediscovery and hardly anyone still knows that the greenhouse effect was discovered by a woman. Hardly anyone knows Eunice Foote. One wonders if this would be different if she had been a man. Although we cannot know for sure, there have been more than enough cases in the history of science not to suspect at least the existence of some gender discrimination also in Eunice’s story.
Some of the most shameful examples of our scientific community are the exclusion from the Nobel Prize of Rosalind Franklin, the first person to discover the double helix structure of DNA, or Jocelyn Bell, the discoverer of those beacons of the cosmic oceans that are the pulsars. With greater and more current media impact, many voices have also been raised in recent months to point out and protest because no woman has won a scientific Nobel Prize this year either.
Despite the fame of these awards, this clear inequality between its recipients is really nothing more than the tip of an iceberg of exclusion and discrimination that persists in our community.
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Perhaps in the shadows in which she was forced to live, as has happened with many other women of whom we still know nothing, Eunice was showing us the way not only to be better as a species, but to be more aware of the consequences of our actions, but also to be better human beings in the present.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original.