The woman who really discovered the greenhouse effect

We spend a lot of time talking about the present and the future whether that’s at school, at work, in the stock market, or even when talking about the climate crisis. On the Climate Blog, we spend a lot of time discussing future innovations, but this week, we are going to take a quick trip to the past and focus on who is to be credited for discovering the greenhouse effect.

John Tyndall was an Irish physicist in the 19th century. He did a variety of research and scientific work. He developed the first double beam spectrometer, he ultimately explained why the sky is blue (through something now known as the Tyndall Effect), he invented an efficient method to destroy bacteria in food, called Tyndallisation, and disproved the idea that life could be spontaneously generated. Tyndall was all over the place in the world of science, but one of the most notable things he did was, apparently, discovering what is known today as the greenhouse effect.

Tyndall showed that gasses, such as CO2 and water vapor have a high GWP and absorb and radiate heat. His experiment was essentially having a copper cube with boiling water inside radiate heat and testing the effects on the different gasses. He concluded from his experiments that without water vapor, the Earth would be a freezing cold icebox. Ultimately, he is commonly credited towards discovering the greenhouse effect.

However, 5 years before, in 1856, a woman named Eunice Newton Foote discovered the greenhouse effect, yet she is rarely credited for it. Foote’s experiment consisted of two glass cylinders, two thermometers and an air pump. She filled one cylinder with CO2 and one with air and set them both out in the Sun. She quickly realized that the cylinder filled with CO2 heated much faster and took much longer to cool. She performed her experiment on numerous gasses and concluded that carbon dioxide got the most heated and took the longest to cool.

She concluded that “An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature” making her paper and experiment the first scientific research done on the greenhouse effect and global warming. However, she was forgotten until the 21st century, while John Tyndall was credited for his discovery and as a founding father of science.

There is a lot of debate over whether or not Tyndall actually stole Foote’s research, however, it is worth noting that a research paper of his, on animal color blindness, was published in the same publication as her research on the greenhouse effect. There is no mention of her in his work.

Regardless, Foote’s discoveries undoubtedly came first, and her credit certainly came last. Ray Sorenson, an amateur historian, discovered Foote’s work in 2010 and had his findings published, and in 2019, the University of California set up an exhibition about Eunice Foote’s work.

It may not seem important to know about the past, since we live in the present and we look to the future. But, people have devoted their lives towards researching something that shapes our world today, so it is important to know who actually gets the credit and acknowledge the fact that people are not honest and we learn what people want us to learn.

So, an American scientist in 1856, was the first discoverer of the greenhouse effect. Not an Irish physicist named John Tyndall, but an overlooked, undercredited, brilliant scientist named Eunice Newton Foote.