Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We have done various episodes related to the environment on the show before, so things like the Donora smog and the Cuyahoga River fires and the London smog of n two. We talked about extinctions in our episode on endlings, and about invasive species, and our episode on Australia's rabbit proof Fence, and then in more recent times in our episode on Kutzoo that came out not too long ago. While all of these topics are related to the environment and humans and industries impacts on the environment, none of it's really about climate. I don't know that we've ever talked about the climate, uh, in terms of the current climate crisis. We've talked about things like the year without a Summer, which was a climactic phenomenon. Yeah, and we've talked about ways different scientists have measured various aspects of the climate a little bit. Yeah, some of that has come up in Unearthed. Yeah, not climate itself specifically, Yeah, and the warming of the climate in particular, which is an ongoing emergency, obviously, so today we are going to remedy that. We're going to talk about. Eunice Newton Foot and in eighteen fifty six she became the first person to make a connection between the Earth's temperature and the concentration of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere. That credit, though, usually goes to John Tendall, who made the same connection a few years later. Eunice Newton was born in Goshen, Connecticut, on July eighteen nineteen, and she was baptized on September twenty nine of that year. Her father's name was Ice Newton, Jr. Which is a delightful coincidence considering Eunice's path in life, and her mother's name was Thursday, and Eunice was the eleventh of their twelve children. Isaac not a scientist or a philosopher, but a farmer, and although he seems to have been very successful at this, he also liked to invest in various business ventures, and these did not always work out, and by the time he died in eighteen thirty five, he was deeply in debt. Sometime after Unice was born, but well before her father's death, the family moved to East Bloomfield, New York, and that's where Eunice's parents would live for the rest of their lives. And really beyond that, we just don't know much about her early life, except that in eighteen thirty six, when she was about seventeen, she enrolled at Troy Female Seminary that later became known as the Emma Willard School after its founder. It's possible that Unice left journals, correspondence, or other personal accounts of her time in Troy or other times in her life, but if she did, they have not been brought to light. So we don't really know much more about her time at the seminary than we do about her earlier life. But there are a couple of conclusions that we can draw. One is that her education there would have had a really strong foundation in science, and that's something that wasn't really typical for a women's school at the time. Emma Willard corresponded and collaborated with Amice Eaton, who was co founder of the Renseller School that's now Rinseller Polytechnic Institute that was about seven miles or eleven kilometers away from Troy. Eaton was a natural scientist and an educational reformer, and his reforms included a focus on learning by doing rather than focusing on memorization. So Willard's curriculum for the Women's Seminary incorporated a lot of these ideas. So Unice would not only have attended lecturers on the scientists, she also would have learned about designing and conducting speriments as part of scientific study. It's also possible that Eunice's time at the seminary influenced a connection that would happen later in her life. Eunice was at the Seminary from eighteen thirty six to eighteen thirty eight, and later on she would live near and work with Elizabeth Katie Stanton, who graduated from Troy Female Seminary in eighteen thirty two. So it is possible, but not really documented anywhere, that these two women felt a connection thanks to their having gone to the same school. On August twelfth, eighteen forty one, when Eunice was twenty two, she married Elisha Foote, who was about ten years older than she was. After their marriage, they moved to Seneca Falls, New York, also home to Elizabeth Katie Stanton. At one point, Elisha actually bought the home that's known today as the Elizabeth Katie Stanton House, although it doesn't look like the Foot's ever lived in that house. Both of Unice and Elisha's children were born in Seneca Falls, and those were Mary, who was born on July twenty one, eighteen forty two, and Augusta, who was born October eighteen forty four. In eighteen forty eight, while living in Seneca Falls, both Eunice and Elisha were involved with the women's rights movement and the Seneca Falls Convention. Unice was one of the five women on the committee that was tasked with keeping the conference proceedings. She and Elisha also both signed the Declaration of Sentiments that was crafted during the convention. On most reproductions of that document, Eunice's signature is fifth after Lucretia Mott, Harriet Katie Eaton, Margaret Prior, and Elizabeth Katie Stanton. Again, we don't have a lot of personal remembrance of her, but all of this suggests that she was an active and involved participant in this phase of the women's rights movement in the United States. While living in Seneca Falls, Unice became a member of the American Art Union, which worked to promote the creation and sale of American art. All Aisha became District attorney for Seneca County and then a judge of the Court of Common Pleas. Eventually, the Foots moved from Seneca Falls to Saratoga Springs, New York. And regardless of where they lived, both Elisha and Unice seemed to have both been really interested in experiments and inventions. Their published work suggests that they set up laboratories in their homes where they did experimental work that they hoped would be worthy of publication. This includes the papers that were read at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in eighteen fifty six, which is where we are at chronologically in this story. But we're going to have a lengthier discussion of Unice's scientific work later, so for now we will move on to the rest of what we know about her life. In addition to their published scientific work, both Elisha and Unice applied for and were granted multiple patents. Unite's patents included one for a quote filling for souls of boots and shoes that's kept the boots in the shoes from squeaking that patent was issued in eighteen sixty Later, she developed a paper making machine. According to a favorable write up of this machine in the Boston Posts in eighteen sixty four, one Massachusetts paper maker that put this invention into use was saving a hundred and fifty seven dollars a day in materials, which would have been a significant amount. In eighteen sixty four. That same article suggested that rapping and printing papers that were made using this method would cost two or three cents less per pound than other paper did. One of a Lisha's specialties as an attorney was patent law, and he represented himself in legal disputes involving his patents, and since some of his patents were financially valuable, there were several of those. For example, one of his inventions was a device to regulate the draft of stoves, and a dispute over this patent led all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court in Sills be versus Foot. This was honestly too convoluted a case to be summed up in an episode that is not about Elisha, or potentially even just that case. But a similar device already existed when Foot's patent was granted, but this case also just includes a ton of back and forth about who had been allowed to introduce what into evidence and how much money was owed to whom. It was a big tangle, not really in the scope of today's show. Yet. When we've done Supreme Court cases on the show before, I've usually really enjoyed reading the text of the Supreme Court decision, but this one just made my eyes crossed. I was like, I can't what are you even saying here. So in eighteen sixty four, though Elishah was appointed to the U. S. Patent Office Board of Appeals, and then in eighteen sixty eight he became the eleventh Commissioner of Patents for the United States. His work at the Patent Office would have required him to be in Washington, d C. By the point the foot daughters, Marian Augusta were grown. They were soon to be married. It's not entirely clear whether they and Eunice went with him, but we do know that Unite did at least visit. On April sixteenth, eighteen sixty eight, Susan B. Anthony's newspaper The Revolution published a piece by Elizabeth Katie Stanton which recounted a trip to Washington d C. It read, in part quote Judge Foote and his scientific wife escorted us to the Patent Office, which, like all other departments of government, we are told, is used for political ends. We did not go there, however, to lay bare its corruptions and favoritisms, but merely that we might have it in our power to refute the assertion of the Reverend Dr Todd, trepanned by Gail Hamilton's, who, in his recent attack on his fair countrywomen, said that there had been no inventors among our sex. And there we found many witnesses against the unhappy Todd. Mrs Unis Foote has herself taken out several patents and is occupied at this time making a new kind of paper. But later Stanton went on to say, quote Mrs Foote remarked to us that she had no doubt that half the patents there were the inventions of women. But as men had the money to get up the models and loved notoriety, they had been taken out in their names. If the Reverend Todd will take the trouble to investigate this matter for himself, he will no doubt find this to be true. Elisha was the Commissioner of Patents for a little less than a year until April of eighteen sixty nine, and then he returned to his private law practice. By the late eighteen seventies, he and Eunice had moved to St. Louis to live with their daughter Mary, who had married John B. Henderson. Henderson had served as the U. S. Senator for Missouri from eighteen sixty two to eighteen sixty nine and was co author of the thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery. Accept his punishment for a crime. This is another one of those movements were not really having a lot of personal accounts about or from her means we don't know a lot of what was going on behind the scenes. So this whole stretch, you know, has happened over a period of time that included the U. S. Civil War, and we just don't have a lot of information about anything in their lives related to that. We can reasonably conclude though, that their daughter marrying the co author of the thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution probably means that they were all against slavery in this context, but not something that's particularly written down anywhere yeah, one would help. But as we know today, not everyone in a family feels the same way. Yeah, and not everybody in New York or any of the other places they lived was totally aligned on that, even though the states in question had outlawed slavery by the time the Civil War started. Anyway, to return to the story, Elijah died of heart disease at the Henderson home on October three, and Unice's life after that point is pretty much a mystery. She died on September eight in Lenox, Massachusetts, at the age of sixty nine. Both she and Elishah were interred in the Foote family Mausoleum in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. According to a nineteen fifteen Newton family genealogy that was compiled by ERMINA. Newton Leonard, Unice was quote a fine portrait and landscape painter. She was an inventive genius and a person of unusual beauty. No picture of Unice survives, at least not one that has been unearthed yet, but her science writing does, and we'll talk more about that after a sponsor break. The American Association for the Advancement of Science was established in Boston in eighteen forty seven, and it held its first meeting in Philadelphia in eighteen forty eight. The organization's purpose was to both promote and advance science, and to that end, it had an official membership roster, but it also arranged annual meetings that were open to the public. In terms of its membership, in those early years, there were no strict criteria. Anyone who was nominated with someone else seconding the nomination was admitted as a member. It was incredibly rare for someone to be denied, and for the most part, once you were remember you were a member for life as long as you paid your dues. But that rule only came into being after the organization realized that there were a lot of people on its membership lists who were not paying dues and weren't really active anymore. It was one of those moments where people were looking at the membership list, like, who are these people? Are they even still alive? Don't really know. Elisha Foote was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science at its tenth meeting, which was held in Albany, New York, in August of eighteen fifties. Six and at that meeting he also read a paper that he had written, which was titled on the Heat of the Sun's Rays. According to the program, he was to read his paper on Friday August, but some accounts place that is happening on the Unice's paper is listed in the program immediately after Elisha's, with a note that it was to be read by Professor Henry. That was Professor Joseph Henry, who was the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a past president of the Triple A S. Although the program that was printed ahead of the meeting shows both of the Foot's papers with the same title. When Unicees was printed later, it was with the title Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun's Rays. So side note here. For reasons that are not clear to me at all, neither Elisha's nor Unice's papers was printed in the proceedings of this eighteen fifty six Triple A S meeting, nor were they included in the list of papers that were not being printed because their authors hadn't turned in a copy to be printed, which delights me that that was a list in there, and that there were seventies six papers on it, which just feels like a lot. It's tricky to tell how that number of seventies six papers compares to the total number of papers that were read, though, because in the program some of the papers were read more than once. So I tried to figure that out to be like, Okay, how many people read a paper and didn't turn in a copy of the paper, And then I was like, I'm gonna have to print all this thing out and cross off duplicates, and that's just not happening today. So both these papers, though, were later printed in volume twenty two of the American Journal of Science and Arts that was in November of eighteen fifty six. Each of the papers was noted as having been read at the Triple A s meeting. So it's just kind of a mystery exactly what went on in terms of the proceedings. Given their similar subject matter and some common elements in their methods, it's likely that Elisha and Unice collaborated with one another on their experiments and their papers. Elisha's used a variety of setups to compare the ambient temperature to the temperature that the thermometer recorded when it was placed in the sun. Measuring what he called the quote relative heat of the Sun's rays, which got stronger when the ambient temperature was hotter. He also did the same experiment using a burning glass to focus the sun's rays. Unice's experiment looked at how the heat of the sun affected different gases, and her words quote the experiments were made with an air pump and two cylindrical receivers of the same size, about four inches in diameter and thirty in length in each were placed two thermometers, and the air was exhausted from one and condensed in the other. After both had acquired the same temperature, they were placed in the sun side by side, and while the action of the sun's rays rose to a hundred and ten degrees in the condensed tube, it attained only eighty eight degree in the other. She concluded in this part of the paper that quote, this circumstance must affect the power of the Sun's rays in different places and contribute to their feeble action on the summits of lofty mountains. She doesn't specify what these cylinders were made of, but they were presumably glass. Unite repeated the same experiment using air that had been saturated with moisture in one tube and air that had been dried with calcium chloride in the other. And she found that when the cylinders were placed in the sun, the air that was full of water vapor got hotter than the dry air did. And third, she repeated the same experiment with common air in one tube and carbonic acid gas, which was the term used at the time for carbon dioxide in the other. She wrote, quote, the highest effect of the Sun's rays I have found to be in carbonic acid gas. She also noted that quote the receiver containing the gas became itself much heated, very sensibly more so than the other, and on being removed, it was many times as long in cooling. Foot concluded by saying of the carbonic acid gas, quote, an atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature. And if, as some suppose, at one period of its history, the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its own action, as well as from increased weight, must have necessarily resulted. On comparing the Sun's heat in different gases, I found it to be in hydrogen gas one hundred four degrees in common air one hundred six degrees, in oxygen gas on eight degrees, and in carbonic acid gas one twenty five degrees. The significance of this wasn't really understood at the time, but this makes Unice Newton Foot the first person to connect carbon dioxide and water vapor, which we know today as greenhouse gases, to the Earth's climate and the possibility of a warmer planet. There are a lot of sources that say that Unice was prohibited from reading this paper at the Triple A S meeting because she was a woman, and that that's why Joseph Henry read it on her behalf. And there were definitely men in the Triple A S who did not think women belonged there, but the association did allow women as members. The first woman to be elected was astronomer mur Riya Mitchell in eighteen fifty. Entomologist Margaretta Morris was elected that same year. Triple A S meetings were open to the public, and the Triple A S had issued an open invitation for women to attend its first meeting in eighteen forty eight, and women frequently did attend, although again there were certainly men in the Triple A s, who considered women more like companions and ornaments for the male membership than participants, like active participants with knowledge and interests of their own. Unie was not a member of the Triple A S, but non members also presented papers at every Triple A S meeting between eighteen forty eight and eighteen sixty. Strangely, Triple A S records of non member activity don't record any non members presenting in eighteen fifty six. That may be because Joseph Henry read Unite's paper for her, or because she was considered to be covered under her husband's membership. That list also assumes the non members in question are men, so it also wasn't unheard of for people's papers to be read by someone other than the author themselves. At that eighteen fifty six meeting, Arthur shots paper on the geology of the lower Rio Bravo was read by topographical engineer W. H. Emery, who was a major in the U. S. Army. Emery also read Marine T. W. Chandler's on the meteorological phenomena observed at various points on the Boundary Survey and the reasons for Emery reading these two papers and proxy for someone else that's not really noted anywhere. So it's possible that the organizer of the Triple A S meeting in eighteen fifty six prevented units from reading her own paper because she was a woman. But if that is the case, it's just not documented anywhere, and the ongoing involvement of women in the Triple a S at this point suggests that there may have been some other explanation. Foot is the only woman known to have presented a paper that year, even though it was presented by proxy, and as a note on that proxy, Joseph Henry was extremely prominent and well respected in the scientific community, so it's also possible that his reading of the paper was intended as an honor. He also seems to have felt compelled to make some remarks on the subject of women's roles in science, although there's no word for word transcript of what these remarks were anywhere. They were summarized and in eighteen fifty seven volume that was edited by David A. Wells, and this was titled we have a long title which everyone knows we love Annual of Scientific Discovery or Yearbook of Facts in Science and Art for eighteen fifty seven exhibiting the most important discoveries and improvements and mechanics, useful arts, natural philosophy, chemistry, astronomy, meteorology, zoology, botany, mineralogy, geology, geography, antiquities, etcetera, together with a list of recent scientific publications, a classified list of patents, obituaries of eminent scientific men, notes on the progress of science during the year eighteen fifty six, etcetera. It's a zippy one, just rolls off the tone. I got almost to the end of the list of subjects before I had to take a breath. Before summarizing the content of Foot's paper, Wells characterized Henry's comments this way quote. Professor Henry then read a paper by Mrs Unice Foot, prefacing it with a few words to the effect that science was of no country and of no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true. If Eunice Newton Foot was indeed prohibited from reading her own paper in the eighteen fifty six Triple a s Meeting, that prohibition seems to have been lifted the next year, eighteen fifty seven. That year, she was scheduled to read on a new source of electrical excitation at the annual meeting in Montreal. According to the program, she was to present her paper on Friday, August fourteenth, and there is no notation in the program that would suggest that she did not read it herself, although there's another report that suggests that she was introduced again by Joseph Henry. This second paper documented an experiment she had done over the course of eight months, again using pumps to either condense or evacuate air in a container. She concluded quote the compression or expansion of atmospheric air produces an electrical excitation. There are only two physics papers known to have been written by women and published in American journals prior to eighteen eighty nine, and they are these two papers by Eunice Newton Foot. She also wrote two of the only sixteen physics papers known to have been published by American women in the entire nineteenth century. Also in eighteen fifty nine, after ongoing discussion with the Triple A s about women's roles in the organization, this statement was printed in the proceedings of its thirteenth meeting, quote, no action is necessary in regard to the motion to admit Ladies as members. Inasmuch as two ladies have already been admitted, it's not clear whether that motion that's referenced was made and addressed before or after educator and scientist Elmira Lincoln Phelps became a member, which happened at that meeting. Elmira Lincoln Phelps, Maria Mitchell, and Margaretta Morris are the only three women known to have officially been Triple As members before eighteen sixty, although since many people on the member list included only their initial as, there might have been others. We'll talk about how Eunice Newton Foots papers were received and their impact after another quick sponsor break. After Joseph Henry read Unice Newton Foot's paper at the eighteen fifty six meeting of the Triple A s, it got some attention in both the United States and Europe in both popular and scientific journals. As we said earlier, both the Foot's papers were published in full in the American Journal of Science and Arts, and David A. Wells Annual of Scientific Discovery paraphrase both of their papers, as well as Henry's introductory remarks of Unice's paper. Even though Unice's paper is much shorter than her husband's. His synopsis of a little longer than the one of of her husband's is perhaps she was so succinct he felt you needed to like really make sure people understood. Uh. The September eighteen fifty six issue of Scientific American included an article titled Scientific Ladies Experiments with Condensed Gases. It commented on women's participation in science, reading in part quote, owing to the nature of women's duties, few of them have had the leisure or the opportunities to pursue science experimentally. But those of them who have had the taste and the opportunity to do so have shown as much power and ability to investigate and observe correctly as men. This article then described Foots experiments and her conclusions before dipping a toe into a debate that was going on at the time between the plutonists and the neptunists. Briefly, plutonists argued that the Earth had previously been molten and that rocks were formed through volcanic activity, while neptunists argued that rocks had formed from sediment in the oceans. Now, either of these two ideas was totally right, and neither one was totally wrong. They both had some valid points and some inaccuracies, but geologists were just divided into these two camps. The author of this Scientific American article contended that foots experiments provided quote a more rational cause for quote ancient great atmospheric heat uh than the idea of the earth having previously been a fiery ball. This piece ended by saying, quote, the columns of the Scientific American have been oftentimes graced with articles on scientific subjects by ladies, which would do honor to men of the highest scientific reputation, and the experiments of Mrs Foote afford abundant evidence of the ability of woman to investigate any subject with originality and precision. The October eighteen fifty six edition of United States magazine was overall not as flattering as that was. It's article Science and Savans in America, which was written under the pen name Anthroposts, covered the eighteen fifty six Triple A S meeting, noting that no women or people of color were included in the organization's membership list. It's not clear what whoever wrote this article was using as the list that they were working from, because the list that was published in the conference proceedings included both Maria Mitchell and Margaretta Morris. This article, though, claims that Foote and Mitchell were both considered to be members, while not mentioning Morris at all. This article mentions Henry reading Foot's paper and quote apologizing as he did so for the lady, who, he said, although thus devoting her time to science, had a feminine heart. We protest against such apologies and feel that it is the opposite fact that so few of our countrywomen can be found who give any attention to science as amateurs. Pardon the solcism or investing eiders. It is this fact that needs either explanation or apology. This goes on to describe quote ladies of perfect breeding and finish gracing by their presence the chambers in which the sessions were held and listening intently to the enunciation of obstruse principles and mathematical and physical science. Uh. This sort of sounds like it could be leading into a discussion of the barriers to women's participation in science, but it does not do that. Instead, it becomes insulting, saying, quote, we could not help asking ourselves, why does it not occur to this portion of our race, that they have faculties of observation and reason as well as we, and that instead of displaying the last new bonnet and the richest lace on the side seats, or perhaps whispering and tittering over some trifling, ludicrous incident in the proceedings, it is their prerogative, not less than that of man, to bring upon the tapist before a scientific body, the results of their investigations, discoveries and deductions, and the common world of matter and mind, which, with them we jointly inhabit. It started so good, and then at lands with why are you so dingy? Women? I really thought as I started reading it, I was like, oh, man, I really think this is gonna be talking a lot about, like why there weren't women and people of color and involved in this more? No, it just became a bunch of sexistencils. Nice. A summary of the eighteen fifty six meetings of the British and American Associations of the Advancement of Science, was published in the Canadian Journal of Industry, Science and Art. It summarizes Unice's paper, but makes no mention of her husband's. The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal for eighteen fifty seven summarizes Unice's paper as well, but since it also mentions Alisha's work, it's a little unclear which of them the journal is attributing the experiment to. The German journal Yadresbick printed a summer of it as well, which was dated eighteen fifty six, although that actually came out in eighteen fifty seven. Then, on May eighteenth, eighteen fifty nine, Irish physicist John Tendall made a similar observation to Eunice Newton Foots about the ability of water, vapor and carbon dioxide gas to hold heat. He reported this observation to the Royal Society of London later that same year, and in his work he credited French physicist Claude Matthias Poult for having done earlier related work. And there's been some discussion about whether Tendall knew about Eunice Newton Foots work and disregarded it because of her sex. Roland Jackson, who was publishing in the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science in twenty nineteen, argues that he probably did not, that this omission is more about the state of scientific communication across the Atlantic in the mid nineteenth century. He speculates that Tendell just wouldn't have been likely to have read any of the journals or other publications that referenced foots work prior to his own observations. Tindall's experimental setup was more sophisticated than Foots was, but unlike her, he did not make the connection between these gases and the Earth's climate until later in his work. In eighteen sixty one, he did some research that showed that carbon dioxide, water vapor, and hydrocarbon gases like methane absorbed more radiant energy than nitrogen and oxygen, which are the primary components of air. That's really when he started to speculate that different concentrations of these gases can affect the Earth's climate. The first paper to really quantify the carbon dioxide concentrations involved in the greenhouse gas effect was published by Swedish scientists Vante august Arian Has in his later work, also suggests that the burning of fossil fuels contributes to this process. About ten years after Tindall published his work on this, he and Joseph Henry became acquainted, but there's no suggestion that the two of them ever talked about Foot's work and how it related to Tindall's. However, there were other people who cited Eunice Newton Foot's work later on in the nineteenth century. For example, Ethan Samuel Chapin's book Gravitation The Determining Force references Henry's reading of Foot's paper at the Triple A s in a section on conditions likely to affect the temperature of the Moon's surface. This section of the book discusses matter on the Moon and how different densities of that matter must have different capabilities for retaining heat. This is interesting to me because it suggests not only that people were familiar with what she had written about, but that they thought it was important enough to also apply it to other situations than what she was directly experimenting on. Today, John Tendall, not Eunice Newton Foot is often known as the founder of climate science, but over the last decade people have been trying to correct that attribution. This effort really started in twenty eleven when Raymond Sorenson published Unice Foot's pioneering research on CEO two and climate warming that was published in the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Search and Discovery. Sorenson had stumbled across that summary of Foot's paper that was in the eighteen fifty seven Annual of Scientific Discovery and had realized its significance. There was even less publicly available information about Unice Newton Foote in eleven than there is today, Not even the text of her paper had been unearthed at that point. Sorenson updated his paper in to note that a copy of her paper had been found in the Saratoga Springs City Historians files in Saratoga Springs, New York, and that copy matched the one that was printed in the American Journal of Science and Arts. This update also clarified that it was Foote herself who made the connection between carbon dioxide gas and the Earth's climate, and the climate having been maybe previously warmer prior to the discovery of her original paper, though it had not been clear whether she had made that connection herself or whether it was something David A. Wells had speculated on when he was writing up that little summary of it. However, we should note that claims that Eunice Newton Foote was totally forgotten until Raymond Sorenson published his paper are not really accurate. Sorenson does seem to have been the first person to directly point out that Foote was the first person to observe something that Tindall got the credit for, but Sally Gregory coolesteads the formation of the American scientific Community. The American Association for the Advancement of Science eighteen forty eighteen sixty was published by the University of Illinois Press in nineteen seventy six, and it mentions Foot delivering her paper on electrical excitation in eighteen fifty seven. In addition to that information on Foot that's found debt ancestry dot com also includes a scan of a nineteen seventies six letter from Deborah Dean Warner, who was then Curator of the History of Physical Sciences at the Smithsonian, to Dr Judith Wellman at State University of New York. Warner and Wellman had talked about Foot at the National Archives Conference on Women's History, according to this letter, and the letter mentions both of Foot's papers and their titles. Warner's Science Education for Women in ante Bellum America, published in the journal ISIS, a Journal of the History of Science Society in ninety eight, also cites both of Foot's papers. Wellman's The Road to Seneca Falls Elizabeth Katie Stanton in the First Women's Rights Convention, which was published in two thousand four, also mentions both papers existence but not their subjects, and Lois Arnold's Four Lives in Science Women's Education in the Nineteenth Century, which was published in nineteen eighty four, mentions Foot's article on the from the Sun's Rays, using the eighteen fifty six Scientific American article as its source on that. So there were various folks who were definitely talking about Unice Newton Foot and other contexts before that breaking out. There's also a short film on Unice Newton Foot called Unice and that was released in and it is available on YouTube as a Unice Newton Foot. I have listener mail the Circles Backs to Invasive Species, which I had flagged to read back in June when we got it is now August, and then it just I just didn't somehow I overlooked it after that, So this is from Wendy, and Wendy wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy, I have just listened to your kad Zoo episode and I'm finally prompted to email and thank you for your excellent program. You succeed in combining deep, well considered research with an entertaining presentation. The kad Zoo episode reminded me of the prickly pair story, which my mother used to tell me as a child. She grew up in the nineteen nis in Queensland, Australia, where the prickly pear cactus had become an invasive pest on farmland. She said it was introduced earlier to start a cokeneal industry, since the cocon eal insect, which is used to make red dye, lives on prickly pear plants, but it got out of hand. In the nineteen twenties, the moth Cacto blasts cactorum was introduced to Australia as a biological control since its larvae eat the prickly pear. It was pretty successful and now there are a very few prickly pear plants seen in rural areas, although there were still a lot. When I was a child in the fifties, my mother was a home science teacher. She gave me her fruit preserving recipe book from the nineteen thirties, which has a recipe for prickly pear jelly. It starts with quote, take four dozen nice ripe prickly pears and put them in boiling water to soften the prickles. Then take a knife and scrape them all off, cut into pieces, and boil. After that, it's like a normal jelly recipe. Straining the juice from the pulp, adding sugar and boiling sounds like a lot of work. Thank you for your program. I'm a great fan of history and never missed an episode. Wendy, Thank you so much, Wendy for this note. We have talked a little bit about coconeal in earlier episodes, about things like dyes and colors, and I don't think I've realized that the efforts to introduce plants that coconeal could live on had led to invasive species problems. It's not entirely surprising, because that does happen when you introduce species to places they don't normally live sometimes. So thank you again for your notes. If anyone would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or a history podcast at i heeart radio dot com. And we're also all over social media at miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H

Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Fry. We have done various episodes related to the environment on the show before, so things like the Donora smog and the Cuyahoga River fires and the London smog of n two. We talked about extinctions in our episode on endlings, and about invasive species, and our episode on Australia's rabbit proof Fence, and then in more recent times in our episode on Kutzoo that came out not too long ago. While all of these topics are related to the environment and humans and industries impacts on the environment, none of it's really about climate. I don't know that we've ever talked about the climate, uh, in terms of the current climate crisis. We've talked about things like the year without a Summer, which was a climactic phenomenon. Yeah, and we've talked about ways different scientists have measured various aspects of the climate a little bit. Yeah, some of that has come up in Unearthed. Yeah, not climate itself specifically, Yeah, and the warming of the climate in particular, which is an ongoing emergency, obviously, so today we are going to remedy that. We're going to talk about. Eunice Newton Foot and in eighteen fifty six she became the first person to make a connection between the Earth's temperature and the concentration of carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere. That credit, though, usually goes to John Tendall, who made the same connection a few years later. Eunice Newton was born in Goshen, Connecticut, on July eighteen nineteen, and she was baptized on September twenty nine of that year. Her father's name was Ice Newton, Jr. Which is a delightful coincidence considering Eunice's path in life, and her mother's name was Thursday, and Eunice was the eleventh of their twelve children. Isaac not a scientist or a philosopher, but a farmer, and although he seems to have been very successful at this, he also liked to invest in various business ventures, and these did not always work out, and by the time he died in eighteen thirty five, he was deeply in debt. Sometime after Unice was born, but well before her father's death, the family moved to East Bloomfield, New York, and that's where Eunice's parents would live for the rest of their lives. And really beyond that, we just don't know much about her early life, except that in eighteen thirty six, when she was about seventeen, she enrolled at Troy Female Seminary that later became known as the Emma Willard School after its founder. It's possible that Unice left journals, correspondence, or other personal accounts of her time in Troy or other times in her life, but if she did, they have not been brought to light. So we don't really know much more about her time at the seminary than we do about her earlier life. But there are a couple of conclusions that we can draw. One is that her education there would have had a really strong foundation in science, and that's something that wasn't really typical for a women's school at the time. Emma Willard corresponded and collaborated with Amice Eaton, who was co founder of the Renseller School that's now Rinseller Polytechnic Institute that was about seven miles or eleven kilometers away from Troy. Eaton was a natural scientist and an educational reformer, and his reforms included a focus on learning by doing rather than focusing on memorization. So Willard's curriculum for the Women's Seminary incorporated a lot of these ideas. So Unice would not only have attended lecturers on the scientists, she also would have learned about designing and conducting speriments as part of scientific study. It's also possible that Eunice's time at the seminary influenced a connection that would happen later in her life. Eunice was at the Seminary from eighteen thirty six to eighteen thirty eight, and later on she would live near and work with Elizabeth Katie Stanton, who graduated from Troy Female Seminary in eighteen thirty two. So it is possible, but not really documented anywhere, that these two women felt a connection thanks to their having gone to the same school. On August twelfth, eighteen forty one, when Eunice was twenty two, she married Elisha Foote, who was about ten years older than she was. After their marriage, they moved to Seneca Falls, New York, also home to Elizabeth Katie Stanton. At one point, Elisha actually bought the home that's known today as the Elizabeth Katie Stanton House, although it doesn't look like the Foot's ever lived in that house. Both of Unice and Elisha's children were born in Seneca Falls, and those were Mary, who was born on July twenty one, eighteen forty two, and Augusta, who was born October eighteen forty four. In eighteen forty eight, while living in Seneca Falls, both Eunice and Elisha were involved with the women's rights movement and the Seneca Falls Convention. Unice was one of the five women on the committee that was tasked with keeping the conference proceedings. She and Elisha also both signed the Declaration of Sentiments that was crafted during the convention. On most reproductions of that document, Eunice's signature is fifth after Lucretia Mott, Harriet Katie Eaton, Margaret Prior, and Elizabeth Katie Stanton. Again, we don't have a lot of personal remembrance of her, but all of this suggests that she was an active and involved participant in this phase of the women's rights movement in the United States. While living in Seneca Falls, Unice became a member of the American Art Union, which worked to promote the creation and sale of American art. All Aisha became District attorney for Seneca County and then a judge of the Court of Common Pleas. Eventually, the Foots moved from Seneca Falls to Saratoga Springs, New York. And regardless of where they lived, both Elisha and Unice seemed to have both been really interested in experiments and inventions. Their published work suggests that they set up laboratories in their homes where they did experimental work that they hoped would be worthy of publication. This includes the papers that were read at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in eighteen fifty six, which is where we are at chronologically in this story. But we're going to have a lengthier discussion of Unice's scientific work later, so for now we will move on to the rest of what we know about her life. In addition to their published scientific work, both Elisha and Unice applied for and were granted multiple patents. Unite's patents included one for a quote filling for souls of boots and shoes that's kept the boots in the shoes from squeaking that patent was issued in eighteen sixty Later, she developed a paper making machine. According to a favorable write up of this machine in the Boston Posts in eighteen sixty four, one Massachusetts paper maker that put this invention into use was saving a hundred and fifty seven dollars a day in materials, which would have been a significant amount. In eighteen sixty four. That same article suggested that rapping and printing papers that were made using this method would cost two or three cents less per pound than other paper did. One of a Lisha's specialties as an attorney was patent law, and he represented himself in legal disputes involving his patents, and since some of his patents were financially valuable, there were several of those. For example, one of his inventions was a device to regulate the draft of stoves, and a dispute over this patent led all the way to the U. S. Supreme Court in Sills be versus Foot. This was honestly too convoluted a case to be summed up in an episode that is not about Elisha, or potentially even just that case. But a similar device already existed when Foot's patent was granted, but this case also just includes a ton of back and forth about who had been allowed to introduce what into evidence and how much money was owed to whom. It was a big tangle, not really in the scope of today's show. Yet. When we've done Supreme Court cases on the show before, I've usually really enjoyed reading the text of the Supreme Court decision, but this one just made my eyes crossed. I was like, I can't what are you even saying here. So in eighteen sixty four, though Elishah was appointed to the U. S. Patent Office Board of Appeals, and then in eighteen sixty eight he became the eleventh Commissioner of Patents for the United States. His work at the Patent Office would have required him to be in Washington, d C. By the point the foot daughters, Marian Augusta were grown. They were soon to be married. It's not entirely clear whether they and Eunice went with him, but we do know that Unite did at least visit. On April sixteenth, eighteen sixty eight, Susan B. Anthony's newspaper The Revolution published a piece by Elizabeth Katie Stanton which recounted a trip to Washington d C. It read, in part quote Judge Foote and his scientific wife escorted us to the Patent Office, which, like all other departments of government, we are told, is used for political ends. We did not go there, however, to lay bare its corruptions and favoritisms, but merely that we might have it in our power to refute the assertion of the Reverend Dr Todd, trepanned by Gail Hamilton's, who, in his recent attack on his fair countrywomen, said that there had been no inventors among our sex. And there we found many witnesses against the unhappy Todd. Mrs Unis Foote has herself taken out several patents and is occupied at this time making a new kind of paper. But later Stanton went on to say, quote Mrs Foote remarked to us that she had no doubt that half the patents there were the inventions of women. But as men had the money to get up the models and loved notoriety, they had been taken out in their names. If the Reverend Todd will take the trouble to investigate this matter for himself, he will no doubt find this to be true. Elisha was the Commissioner of Patents for a little less than a year until April of eighteen sixty nine, and then he returned to his private law practice. By the late eighteen seventies, he and Eunice had moved to St. Louis to live with their daughter Mary, who had married John B. Henderson. Henderson had served as the U. S. Senator for Missouri from eighteen sixty two to eighteen sixty nine and was co author of the thirteenth Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, which outlawed slavery. Accept his punishment for a crime. This is another one of those movements were not really having a lot of personal accounts about or from her means we don't know a lot of what was going on behind the scenes. So this whole stretch, you know, has happened over a period of time that included the U. S. Civil War, and we just don't have a lot of information about anything in their lives related to that. We can reasonably conclude though, that their daughter marrying the co author of the thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution probably means that they were all against slavery in this context, but not something that's particularly written down anywhere yeah, one would help. But as we know today, not everyone in a family feels the same way. Yeah, and not everybody in New York or any of the other places they lived was totally aligned on that, even though the states in question had outlawed slavery by the time the Civil War started. Anyway, to return to the story, Elijah died of heart disease at the Henderson home on October three, and Unice's life after that point is pretty much a mystery. She died on September eight in Lenox, Massachusetts, at the age of sixty nine. Both she and Elishah were interred in the Foote family Mausoleum in Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. According to a nineteen fifteen Newton family genealogy that was compiled by ERMINA. Newton Leonard, Unice was quote a fine portrait and landscape painter. She was an inventive genius and a person of unusual beauty. No picture of Unice survives, at least not one that has been unearthed yet, but her science writing does, and we'll talk more about that after a sponsor break. The American Association for the Advancement of Science was established in Boston in eighteen forty seven, and it held its first meeting in Philadelphia in eighteen forty eight. The organization's purpose was to both promote and advance science, and to that end, it had an official membership roster, but it also arranged annual meetings that were open to the public. In terms of its membership, in those early years, there were no strict criteria. Anyone who was nominated with someone else seconding the nomination was admitted as a member. It was incredibly rare for someone to be denied, and for the most part, once you were remember you were a member for life as long as you paid your dues. But that rule only came into being after the organization realized that there were a lot of people on its membership lists who were not paying dues and weren't really active anymore. It was one of those moments where people were looking at the membership list, like, who are these people? Are they even still alive? Don't really know. Elisha Foote was elected to the American Association for the Advancement of Science at its tenth meeting, which was held in Albany, New York, in August of eighteen fifties. Six and at that meeting he also read a paper that he had written, which was titled on the Heat of the Sun's Rays. According to the program, he was to read his paper on Friday August, but some accounts place that is happening on the Unice's paper is listed in the program immediately after Elisha's, with a note that it was to be read by Professor Henry. That was Professor Joseph Henry, who was the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and a past president of the Triple A S. Although the program that was printed ahead of the meeting shows both of the Foot's papers with the same title. When Unicees was printed later, it was with the title Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun's Rays. So side note here. For reasons that are not clear to me at all, neither Elisha's nor Unice's papers was printed in the proceedings of this eighteen fifty six Triple A S meeting, nor were they included in the list of papers that were not being printed because their authors hadn't turned in a copy to be printed, which delights me that that was a list in there, and that there were seventies six papers on it, which just feels like a lot. It's tricky to tell how that number of seventies six papers compares to the total number of papers that were read, though, because in the program some of the papers were read more than once. So I tried to figure that out to be like, Okay, how many people read a paper and didn't turn in a copy of the paper, And then I was like, I'm gonna have to print all this thing out and cross off duplicates, and that's just not happening today. So both these papers, though, were later printed in volume twenty two of the American Journal of Science and Arts that was in November of eighteen fifty six. Each of the papers was noted as having been read at the Triple A s meeting. So it's just kind of a mystery exactly what went on in terms of the proceedings. Given their similar subject matter and some common elements in their methods, it's likely that Elisha and Unice collaborated with one another on their experiments and their papers. Elisha's used a variety of setups to compare the ambient temperature to the temperature that the thermometer recorded when it was placed in the sun. Measuring what he called the quote relative heat of the Sun's rays, which got stronger when the ambient temperature was hotter. He also did the same experiment using a burning glass to focus the sun's rays. Unice's experiment looked at how the heat of the sun affected different gases, and her words quote the experiments were made with an air pump and two cylindrical receivers of the same size, about four inches in diameter and thirty in length in each were placed two thermometers, and the air was exhausted from one and condensed in the other. After both had acquired the same temperature, they were placed in the sun side by side, and while the action of the sun's rays rose to a hundred and ten degrees in the condensed tube, it attained only eighty eight degree in the other. She concluded in this part of the paper that quote, this circumstance must affect the power of the Sun's rays in different places and contribute to their feeble action on the summits of lofty mountains. She doesn't specify what these cylinders were made of, but they were presumably glass. Unite repeated the same experiment using air that had been saturated with moisture in one tube and air that had been dried with calcium chloride in the other. And she found that when the cylinders were placed in the sun, the air that was full of water vapor got hotter than the dry air did. And third, she repeated the same experiment with common air in one tube and carbonic acid gas, which was the term used at the time for carbon dioxide in the other. She wrote, quote, the highest effect of the Sun's rays I have found to be in carbonic acid gas. She also noted that quote the receiver containing the gas became itself much heated, very sensibly more so than the other, and on being removed, it was many times as long in cooling. Foot concluded by saying of the carbonic acid gas, quote, an atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature. And if, as some suppose, at one period of its history, the air had mixed with it a larger proportion than at present, an increased temperature from its own action, as well as from increased weight, must have necessarily resulted. On comparing the Sun's heat in different gases, I found it to be in hydrogen gas one hundred four degrees in common air one hundred six degrees, in oxygen gas on eight degrees, and in carbonic acid gas one twenty five degrees. The significance of this wasn't really understood at the time, but this makes Unice Newton Foot the first person to connect carbon dioxide and water vapor, which we know today as greenhouse gases, to the Earth's climate and the possibility of a warmer planet. There are a lot of sources that say that Unice was prohibited from reading this paper at the Triple A S meeting because she was a woman, and that that's why Joseph Henry read it on her behalf. And there were definitely men in the Triple A S who did not think women belonged there, but the association did allow women as members. The first woman to be elected was astronomer mur Riya Mitchell in eighteen fifty. Entomologist Margaretta Morris was elected that same year. Triple A S meetings were open to the public, and the Triple A S had issued an open invitation for women to attend its first meeting in eighteen forty eight, and women frequently did attend, although again there were certainly men in the Triple A s, who considered women more like companions and ornaments for the male membership than participants, like active participants with knowledge and interests of their own. Unie was not a member of the Triple A S, but non members also presented papers at every Triple A S meeting between eighteen forty eight and eighteen sixty. Strangely, Triple A S records of non member activity don't record any non members presenting in eighteen fifty six. That may be because Joseph Henry read Unite's paper for her, or because she was considered to be covered under her husband's membership. That list also assumes the non members in question are men, so it also wasn't unheard of for people's papers to be read by someone other than the author themselves. At that eighteen fifty six meeting, Arthur shots paper on the geology of the lower Rio Bravo was read by topographical engineer W. H. Emery, who was a major in the U. S. Army. Emery also read Marine T. W. Chandler's on the meteorological phenomena observed at various points on the Boundary Survey and the reasons for Emery reading these two papers and proxy for someone else that's not really noted anywhere. So it's possible that the organizer of the Triple A S meeting in eighteen fifty six prevented units from reading her own paper because she was a woman. But if that is the case, it's just not documented anywhere, and the ongoing involvement of women in the Triple a S at this point suggests that there may have been some other explanation. Foot is the only woman known to have presented a paper that year, even though it was presented by proxy, and as a note on that proxy, Joseph Henry was extremely prominent and well respected in the scientific community, so it's also possible that his reading of the paper was intended as an honor. He also seems to have felt compelled to make some remarks on the subject of women's roles in science, although there's no word for word transcript of what these remarks were anywhere. They were summarized and in eighteen fifty seven volume that was edited by David A. Wells, and this was titled we have a long title which everyone knows we love Annual of Scientific Discovery or Yearbook of Facts in Science and Art for eighteen fifty seven exhibiting the most important discoveries and improvements and mechanics, useful arts, natural philosophy, chemistry, astronomy, meteorology, zoology, botany, mineralogy, geology, geography, antiquities, etcetera, together with a list of recent scientific publications, a classified list of patents, obituaries of eminent scientific men, notes on the progress of science during the year eighteen fifty six, etcetera. It's a zippy one, just rolls off the tone. I got almost to the end of the list of subjects before I had to take a breath. Before summarizing the content of Foot's paper, Wells characterized Henry's comments this way quote. Professor Henry then read a paper by Mrs Unice Foot, prefacing it with a few words to the effect that science was of no country and of no sex. The sphere of woman embraces not only the beautiful and the useful, but the true. If Eunice Newton Foot was indeed prohibited from reading her own paper in the eighteen fifty six Triple a s Meeting, that prohibition seems to have been lifted the next year, eighteen fifty seven. That year, she was scheduled to read on a new source of electrical excitation at the annual meeting in Montreal. According to the program, she was to present her paper on Friday, August fourteenth, and there is no notation in the program that would suggest that she did not read it herself, although there's another report that suggests that she was introduced again by Joseph Henry. This second paper documented an experiment she had done over the course of eight months, again using pumps to either condense or evacuate air in a container. She concluded quote the compression or expansion of atmospheric air produces an electrical excitation. There are only two physics papers known to have been written by women and published in American journals prior to eighteen eighty nine, and they are these two papers by Eunice Newton Foot. She also wrote two of the only sixteen physics papers known to have been published by American women in the entire nineteenth century. Also in eighteen fifty nine, after ongoing discussion with the Triple A s about women's roles in the organization, this statement was printed in the proceedings of its thirteenth meeting, quote, no action is necessary in regard to the motion to admit Ladies as members. Inasmuch as two ladies have already been admitted, it's not clear whether that motion that's referenced was made and addressed before or after educator and scientist Elmira Lincoln Phelps became a member, which happened at that meeting. Elmira Lincoln Phelps, Maria Mitchell, and Margaretta Morris are the only three women known to have officially been Triple As members before eighteen sixty, although since many people on the member list included only their initial as, there might have been others. We'll talk about how Eunice Newton Foots papers were received and their impact after another quick sponsor break. After Joseph Henry read Unice Newton Foot's paper at the eighteen fifty six meeting of the Triple A s, it got some attention in both the United States and Europe in both popular and scientific journals. As we said earlier, both the Foot's papers were published in full in the American Journal of Science and Arts, and David A. Wells Annual of Scientific Discovery paraphrase both of their papers, as well as Henry's introductory remarks of Unice's paper. Even though Unice's paper is much shorter than her husband's. His synopsis of a little longer than the one of of her husband's is perhaps she was so succinct he felt you needed to like really make sure people understood. Uh. The September eighteen fifty six issue of Scientific American included an article titled Scientific Ladies Experiments with Condensed Gases. It commented on women's participation in science, reading in part quote, owing to the nature of women's duties, few of them have had the leisure or the opportunities to pursue science experimentally. But those of them who have had the taste and the opportunity to do so have shown as much power and ability to investigate and observe correctly as men. This article then described Foots experiments and her conclusions before dipping a toe into a debate that was going on at the time between the plutonists and the neptunists. Briefly, plutonists argued that the Earth had previously been molten and that rocks were formed through volcanic activity, while neptunists argued that rocks had formed from sediment in the oceans. Now, either of these two ideas was totally right, and neither one was totally wrong. They both had some valid points and some inaccuracies, but geologists were just divided into these two camps. The author of this Scientific American article contended that foots experiments provided quote a more rational cause for quote ancient great atmospheric heat uh than the idea of the earth having previously been a fiery ball. This piece ended by saying, quote, the columns of the Scientific American have been oftentimes graced with articles on scientific subjects by ladies, which would do honor to men of the highest scientific reputation, and the experiments of Mrs Foote afford abundant evidence of the ability of woman to investigate any subject with originality and precision. The October eighteen fifty six edition of United States magazine was overall not as flattering as that was. It's article Science and Savans in America, which was written under the pen name Anthroposts, covered the eighteen fifty six Triple A S meeting, noting that no women or people of color were included in the organization's membership list. It's not clear what whoever wrote this article was using as the list that they were working from, because the list that was published in the conference proceedings included both Maria Mitchell and Margaretta Morris. This article, though, claims that Foote and Mitchell were both considered to be members, while not mentioning Morris at all. This article mentions Henry reading Foot's paper and quote apologizing as he did so for the lady, who, he said, although thus devoting her time to science, had a feminine heart. We protest against such apologies and feel that it is the opposite fact that so few of our countrywomen can be found who give any attention to science as amateurs. Pardon the solcism or investing eiders. It is this fact that needs either explanation or apology. This goes on to describe quote ladies of perfect breeding and finish gracing by their presence the chambers in which the sessions were held and listening intently to the enunciation of obstruse principles and mathematical and physical science. Uh. This sort of sounds like it could be leading into a discussion of the barriers to women's participation in science, but it does not do that. Instead, it becomes insulting, saying, quote, we could not help asking ourselves, why does it not occur to this portion of our race, that they have faculties of observation and reason as well as we, and that instead of displaying the last new bonnet and the richest lace on the side seats, or perhaps whispering and tittering over some trifling, ludicrous incident in the proceedings, it is their prerogative, not less than that of man, to bring upon the tapist before a scientific body, the results of their investigations, discoveries and deductions, and the common world of matter and mind, which, with them we jointly inhabit. It started so good, and then at lands with why are you so dingy? Women? I really thought as I started reading it, I was like, oh, man, I really think this is gonna be talking a lot about, like why there weren't women and people of color and involved in this more? No, it just became a bunch of sexistencils. Nice. A summary of the eighteen fifty six meetings of the British and American Associations of the Advancement of Science, was published in the Canadian Journal of Industry, Science and Art. It summarizes Unice's paper, but makes no mention of her husband's. The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal for eighteen fifty seven summarizes Unice's paper as well, but since it also mentions Alisha's work, it's a little unclear which of them the journal is attributing the experiment to. The German journal Yadresbick printed a summer of it as well, which was dated eighteen fifty six, although that actually came out in eighteen fifty seven. Then, on May eighteenth, eighteen fifty nine, Irish physicist John Tendall made a similar observation to Eunice Newton Foots about the ability of water, vapor and carbon dioxide gas to hold heat. He reported this observation to the Royal Society of London later that same year, and in his work he credited French physicist Claude Matthias Poult for having done earlier related work. And there's been some discussion about whether Tendall knew about Eunice Newton Foots work and disregarded it because of her sex. Roland Jackson, who was publishing in the Royal Society Journal of the History of Science in twenty nineteen, argues that he probably did not, that this omission is more about the state of scientific communication across the Atlantic in the mid nineteenth century. He speculates that Tendell just wouldn't have been likely to have read any of the journals or other publications that referenced foots work prior to his own observations. Tindall's experimental setup was more sophisticated than Foots was, but unlike her, he did not make the connection between these gases and the Earth's climate until later in his work. In eighteen sixty one, he did some research that showed that carbon dioxide, water vapor, and hydrocarbon gases like methane absorbed more radiant energy than nitrogen and oxygen, which are the primary components of air. That's really when he started to speculate that different concentrations of these gases can affect the Earth's climate. The first paper to really quantify the carbon dioxide concentrations involved in the greenhouse gas effect was published by Swedish scientists Vante august Arian Has in his later work, also suggests that the burning of fossil fuels contributes to this process. About ten years after Tindall published his work on this, he and Joseph Henry became acquainted, but there's no suggestion that the two of them ever talked about Foot's work and how it related to Tindall's. However, there were other people who cited Eunice Newton Foot's work later on in the nineteenth century. For example, Ethan Samuel Chapin's book Gravitation The Determining Force references Henry's reading of Foot's paper at the Triple A s in a section on conditions likely to affect the temperature of the Moon's surface. This section of the book discusses matter on the Moon and how different densities of that matter must have different capabilities for retaining heat. This is interesting to me because it suggests not only that people were familiar with what she had written about, but that they thought it was important enough to also apply it to other situations than what she was directly experimenting on. Today, John Tendall, not Eunice Newton Foot is often known as the founder of climate science, but over the last decade people have been trying to correct that attribution. This effort really started in twenty eleven when Raymond Sorenson published Unice Foot's pioneering research on CEO two and climate warming that was published in the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Search and Discovery. Sorenson had stumbled across that summary of Foot's paper that was in the eighteen fifty seven Annual of Scientific Discovery and had realized its significance. There was even less publicly available information about Unice Newton Foote in eleven than there is today, Not even the text of her paper had been unearthed at that point. Sorenson updated his paper in to note that a copy of her paper had been found in the Saratoga Springs City Historians files in Saratoga Springs, New York, and that copy matched the one that was printed in the American Journal of Science and Arts. This update also clarified that it was Foote herself who made the connection between carbon dioxide gas and the Earth's climate, and the climate having been maybe previously warmer prior to the discovery of her original paper, though it had not been clear whether she had made that connection herself or whether it was something David A. Wells had speculated on when he was writing up that little summary of it. However, we should note that claims that Eunice Newton Foote was totally forgotten until Raymond Sorenson published his paper are not really accurate. Sorenson does seem to have been the first person to directly point out that Foote was the first person to observe something that Tindall got the credit for, but Sally Gregory coolesteads the formation of the American scientific Community. The American Association for the Advancement of Science eighteen forty eighteen sixty was published by the University of Illinois Press in nineteen seventy six, and it mentions Foot delivering her paper on electrical excitation in eighteen fifty seven. In addition to that information on Foot that's found debt ancestry dot com also includes a scan of a nineteen seventies six letter from Deborah Dean Warner, who was then Curator of the History of Physical Sciences at the Smithsonian, to Dr Judith Wellman at State University of New York. Warner and Wellman had talked about Foot at the National Archives Conference on Women's History, according to this letter, and the letter mentions both of Foot's papers and their titles. Warner's Science Education for Women in ante Bellum America, published in the journal ISIS, a Journal of the History of Science Society in ninety eight, also cites both of Foot's papers. Wellman's The Road to Seneca Falls Elizabeth Katie Stanton in the First Women's Rights Convention, which was published in two thousand four, also mentions both papers existence but not their subjects, and Lois Arnold's Four Lives in Science Women's Education in the Nineteenth Century, which was published in nineteen eighty four, mentions Foot's article on the from the Sun's Rays, using the eighteen fifty six Scientific American article as its source on that. So there were various folks who were definitely talking about Unice Newton Foot and other contexts before that breaking out. There's also a short film on Unice Newton Foot called Unice and that was released in and it is available on YouTube as a Unice Newton Foot. I have listener mail the Circles Backs to Invasive Species, which I had flagged to read back in June when we got it is now August, and then it just I just didn't somehow I overlooked it after that, So this is from Wendy, and Wendy wrote, Dear Holly and Tracy, I have just listened to your kad Zoo episode and I'm finally prompted to email and thank you for your excellent program. You succeed in combining deep, well considered research with an entertaining presentation. The kad Zoo episode reminded me of the prickly pair story, which my mother used to tell me as a child. She grew up in the nineteen nis in Queensland, Australia, where the prickly pear cactus had become an invasive pest on farmland. She said it was introduced earlier to start a cokeneal industry, since the cocon eal insect, which is used to make red dye, lives on prickly pear plants, but it got out of hand. In the nineteen twenties, the moth Cacto blasts cactorum was introduced to Australia as a biological control since its larvae eat the prickly pear. It was pretty successful and now there are a very few prickly pear plants seen in rural areas, although there were still a lot. When I was a child in the fifties, my mother was a home science teacher. She gave me her fruit preserving recipe book from the nineteen thirties, which has a recipe for prickly pear jelly. It starts with quote, take four dozen nice ripe prickly pears and put them in boiling water to soften the prickles. Then take a knife and scrape them all off, cut into pieces, and boil. After that, it's like a normal jelly recipe. Straining the juice from the pulp, adding sugar and boiling sounds like a lot of work. Thank you for your program. I'm a great fan of history and never missed an episode. Wendy, Thank you so much, Wendy for this note. We have talked a little bit about coconeal in earlier episodes, about things like dyes and colors, and I don't think I've realized that the efforts to introduce plants that coconeal could live on had led to invasive species problems. It's not entirely surprising, because that does happen when you introduce species to places they don't normally live sometimes. So thank you again for your notes. If anyone would like to write to us about this or any other podcast or a history podcast at i heeart radio dot com. And we're also all over social media at miss in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on the I heart Radio app and anywhere else you'd like to get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H