Today, Google Doodle commemorates the 204th birthday of Eunice Newton Foote, an American scientist and women’s rights activist who made a fundamental contribution to climate science by finding the greenhouse effect and its significance in global warming for the first time.
Newton Foote was born in Connecticut in 1819 and attended Troy Female Seminary, which encouraged students to attend science classes and participate in chemistry labs for experiments. Science has since become her lifetime obsession.
In 1856, she carried out an experiment that affected our understanding of climate change today, in which she placed various gases in cylinders and exposed them all to sunlight for observation.
Foote then noticed that carbon dioxide had gotten hotter than the other gases. She then decided that carbon dioxide alone has the potential to modify the Earth’s temperature because it has the greatest heating effect. As a result, she was the first scientist to identify the link between carbon dioxide levels and atmospheric warming.
Her second study on atmospheric static electricity was published in the American Association for the Advancement of Science journal Proceedings. With this, she became the first woman scientist in the United States to publish two physics research.
Following the publication of two investigations, Foote’s work was presented by a male scientist at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, leading to an experiment that revealed the comprehension and meaning of the term “Greenhouse effect.”
In addition, throughout her life, Foote campaigned for women’s rights. In 1848, she attended the inaugural Woman’s Rights Convention in Seneca Falls. She also became the Declaration of Sentiments’ fifth signatory. It is a document that demands social and legal equality for women.
