Eunice Newton Foote: who is the scientist on Google’s homepage – 07/17/2023 – Science
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Google’s home page this Monday (17) is a tribute to the 204th anniversary of the birth of American Eunice Newton Foote, scientist and women’s rights activist.
Foote was the first person to describe the greenhouse effect and its influence on global warming.
Who used to take credit for the discovery of the greenhouse effect, a key piece in all climate science, was the Irish physicist John Tyndall. Beginning in 1859, he published a series of studies that showed how certain gases, including CO2, trap heat in the atmosphere.
Recently, however, it has been discovered that Tyndall was not the forerunner. An issue of “The American Journal of Science and Arts” brings Eunice Foote’s presentation to a congress in 1856. (Detail: as a woman, she had her work exhibited by her husband.)
The scientist describes an experiment she carried out, filling three glass beakers – one with water vapour, another with CO² and another with air – and comparing how they behave in the sun.
That same experiment is still used in classrooms today to demonstrate the greenhouse effect.
Women’s rights activist
Daughter of Theriza Newton and Isaac Newton Jr., a distant relative of the eponymous scientist, Foote was born in 1819, in the city of Goshen (Connecticut).
She participated, in 1848, in the first convention on women’s rights in the USA, in Seneca Falls, in the State of New York.
An advocate of women’s suffrage, Foote was one of the signers of the Declaration of Sentiments, a document that demanded equal social and legal rights for women.
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