Best Of: The Woman Who Demonstrated the Greenhouse Effect
About this episode
The episode discusses Eunice Newton Foote's pioneering work on the greenhouse effect and her subsequent obscurity in history compared to her male counterpart, John Tyndall.
In 1856, decades before the term “greenhouse gas” was coined, Eunice Newton Foote demonstrated the greenhouse effect in her home laboratory. She placed a glass cylinder full of carbon dioxide in the sun, and found that it heated up much faster than a cylinder of ordinary air. Her conclusion: more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere results in a warmer planet. Several years later, a British scientist named John Tyndall conducted a far more complicated experiment that demonstrated the same effect and revealed how it worked. Today, he’s widely known as the man who discovered the greenhouse gas effect. There’s even a crater on the moon named for him! Eunice Newton Foote, meanwhile, was lost to history—until an amateur historian stumbled on her story. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices
People in this episode
Host: Lost Women of Science
Topics covered
- greenhouse effect
- climate science
- historical scientists
- women in science
- carbon dioxide
Keywords
- Eunice Newton Foote
- greenhouse gas
- climate change
- John Tyndall
- 19th century science
More episodes of Lost Women of Science
- Conversations: The Rediscovery of I Who Have Never Known Men
- La mujer que demostró el efecto invernadero
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