Google Doodle on Monday celebrated American scientist and women’s rights activist Eunice Newton Foote on her 204th birth anniversary. Foote discovered the greenhouse effect and its role in the warming of Earth’s climate.
The colourful and interactive Google Doodle with 11 slides lets users click through the illustrations to discover Foote’s scientific discovery.
Eunice Newton Foote was born in 1819 in Connecticut. Her father Isaac Newton Jr., a farmer and entrepreneur, was a distant relative of scientist Isaac Newton who discovered gravity.
At school, she encouraged other students to attend science lectures and participate in chemistry labs experiments.
Apart from scientific work, Foote was also an active women's rights campaigner. She was a neighbor and friend of suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton and in 1848, she attended the first women's rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York.
So how did Foote discover the greenhouse effect?
When she placed mercury thermometers in glass cylinders, she found that the cylinder containing carbon dioxide experienced the most significant heating effect in the sun. She was the first scientist to establish the connection between rising carbon dioxide levels and the warming of the atmosphere.
Foote produced the first two physics studies published by a woman in the United States.
Her scientific contributions and research were not acknowledged for nearly 100 years until it was discovered by women researches in the 20th century. Foote’s contributions to the study of the environment are even more relevant today thanks to the burning issue of climate change.
Foote was married to Elisha Foote Jr., a lawyer. The couple had two daughter, Mary and Augusta. Foote died in Brooklyn in 1888.
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