Eunice Newton Foote: The forgotten scientist who discovered the greenhouse effect in 1856

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/03/16/eunice-newton-foote-the-forgotten-scientist-who-discovered-the-greenhouse-effect-in-1856.html

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Consigned to being little more than a Foote note. :slightly_frowning_face:

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Denying women credit in science history is a real problem, but for the record, Tyndall has a crater named after him because he did other things. Like there is the whole Tyndall effect named after him.

At the time noticing that infrared absorbing gases lead to things heating up more probably didn’t seem like such a big deal…it’s actually a very straightforward consequence of thermodynamics when you don’t have an entire industry lying about them. It is now, of course, so good to see her recognized for figuring it out.

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“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
–Upton Sinclair

Some solutions (and starting points) include:

Every Time She’s Harassed, This Biologist Creates a Wikipedia Page for a Woman Scientist

Maybe success is the best revenge — what if the rest of the world fails to acknowledge your success the way that they should? Is there a way to go back and correct history? Emily Temple-Wood, a biology undergrad student at Loyola University, has some ideas on the matter.

As geobiology professor A. Hope Jahren wrote in the New York Times last week, female scientists often receive emails from male colleagues that are leering, lascivious, and unwarranted: all examples of sexual harassment in the workplace. In an effort to make the best of this crappy situation, Temple-Wood decided that for every harassing email she receives — ones that include date requests, talk of her body, and inappropriate sexual implications — she’ll write a Wikipedia entry for a woman scientist.

A former Wikimedia Foundation staff member, Siko Bouterse, told the Wikimedia Blog that Temple-Wood’s project has been a huge success so far. “She’s created hundreds of articles about women scientists, including articles that address multiple gaps in Wikipedia — it’s really important that she’s not just writing about white women scientists, she’s also working to address underrepresentation of women of color in Wikipedia and looking at other points of intersectionality as well.”

Temple-Wood has been adding new entries to the WikiProject Women Scientists since 2012 (and has taught others how to do so as well). So far she’s featured everyone from Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock (above), experimental physicist Chien-Shiung Wu, and neuroscientist Liliana Lubinska.

and

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Telling the stories is how you keep women from being foot notes in history though.

Most people don’t know Nell Shipman either, but I’m always happy to tell her story if anyone will listen.

Keep this up!

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Eu-nice not newton to puns, I see.

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