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Eunice Newton Foote submitted a paper titled "Circumstances affecting the Heat of the Sun's Rays" to the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1856. Her experiments, which utilized glass cylinders filled with different gas mixtures and exposed to sunlight, demonstrated that air containing carbonic acid (carbon dioxide) trapped significantly more heat than atmospheric air. Foote presciently theorized that if the atmosphere were to contain a high proportion of this gas, an increased temperature would result. However, as a woman in nineteenth-century America, she was not permitted to read her own paper at the conference; instead, it was read by Joseph Henry of the Smithsonian Institution. Three years later, Irish physicist John Tyndall published his own detailed research on the absorption of radiant heat by various gases, establishing the physical basis of the greenhouse effect. For over a century, Tyndall was credited with the discovery, while Foote’s pioneering work fell into obscurity. Recent scholarship has sought to reclaim Foote’s place in the history of climate science, spark discussions on gender bias in academia, and re-examine the criteria for scientific credit. While some historians argue that Foote's qualitative methodology lacked the precision of Tyndall's sophisticated laboratory apparatus, others contend that the fundamental conceptual leap belongs to Foote, emphasizing that her simple experiments accurately predicted the mechanics of global warming.

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