Against the Odds E-Book

John Gribbin & Mary Gribbin

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 328

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Even in the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is still harder for women to make a career in science than men. Two centuries ago, however, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when science as we know it was just getting started, the situation was far worse. Then, the very notion of a female scientist would have been regarded as something of an oxymoron. From bestselling and award-winning science writers John and Mary Gribbin, Against the Odds highlights the achievements of women who overcame hurdles and achieved scientific success (although not always as much as they deserved) in spite of male prejudice, as society changed over about 150 years, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. There is Eunice Newton Foote, who discovered the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect; Chien-Shiung Wu, who discovered the law which allows matter to exist in the Universe today; and Barbara McClintock, who discovered how genes turn on and off. With a foreword from astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell, this book is not only a cautionary tale about the stifling effects of prejudice against women in science, but is a celebration of those who achieved success against the odds - and an inspiration for the next generation.

Leseprobe

 

 

Published in the UK and USA in 2025 byIcon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

ISBN: 978-183773-130-5 ebook: 978-183773-131-2

Text copyright © 2025 John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin

The authors have asserted their moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by SJmagic DESIGN SERVICES, India

Printed and bound in Great Britain

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Foreword by

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

PREFACE

Overcoming Prejudice

INTRODUCTION

Against the Odds

CHAPTER 1

Eunice Newton Foote (17 July 1819–30 September 1888)

Discovered the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect

CHAPTER 2

Lise Meitner (7 November 1878–27 October 1968)

Explained the process of nuclear fission

CHAPTER 3

Emmy Noether (23 March 1882–14 April 1935)

Found the mathematics that underpins particle physics

CHAPTER 4

Inge Lehmann (1888–1993)

Discovered the inner core of the Earth

CHAPTER 5

Irène Joliot-Curie (1897–1956)

Pioneered the development of artificial radioactivity

CHAPTER 6

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900–79)

Discovered what stars are made of

CHAPTER 7

Barbara McClintock (16 June 1902–2 September 1992)

Discovered how genes turn on and off

CHAPTER 8

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin (12 May 1910–29 July 1994)

Used X-rays to determine the structure of vitamin B

12

CHAPTER 9

Chien-Shiung Wu (31 May 1912–16 February 1997)

Discovered the law which allows matter to exist in the Universe today

CHAPTER 10

Rosalind Franklin (25 July 1920–16 April 1958)

Used X-rays to determine the structure of viruses

CHAPTER 11

Lucy Slater (5 January 1922–6 June 2008)

Pioneered the development of computer operating systems

CHAPTER 12

Vera Rubin (23 July 1928–25 December 2016)

Discovered the widespread existence of dark matter in the Universe

Sources and Further Reading

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Paul Gribbin for insights into the workings of computer systems, and Ellie Gribbin for a critical reading of the early version(s) of the chapters. Lif Lund Jacobsen and Georgina Ferry gave permission for us to make extensive use of their studies of the work of, respectively, Inge Lehmann and Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin.

FOREWORD

From astrophysics and atmosphere to viruses and vitamins, this book holds the attention. It is both intriguing and infuriating – the women featured were so able, so innovative and so successful, and yet ignored, overlooked, diminished and patronised.

Twelve biographies cover almost two centuries from the birth of the earliest to the death of the most recent, and the penultimate chapter includes an excellent account (from personal knowledge) of the development of computer operating systems. The treatment is sympathetic, the science is clearly explained, but no punches are pulled – you can sense the authors’ outrage at the treatment (or lack thereof) that these women experienced. The women are mostly Westerners, Chien-Shiung Wu being the exception, so this is also a reflection of how Western society’s gender awareness has developed since the mid-1800s. (Answer – very slowly!)

What a long way science has come in those 200 years also! Technology, riding on the back of scientific discovery, has similarly boomed and enabled so much today. Imagine no laptop computers. Imagine not being able to contact relatives on the other side of the world. Imagine a pandemic like COVID without today’s science and technology.

The accounts are good on context and full of intriguing snippets, which help humanise the women who might otherwise be lionised (a word with male connotations, interestingly) or set apart, above, on a pedestal. Above all, these are stories of intelligent observation, perseverance, staying power and, presumably, self-confidence.

Please read, enjoy and learn from these stories!

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Oxford, May 2024

As a research student, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars, now known to be tiny, extremely dense stars on the edge of becoming black holes. She is a former Professor of Physics at the Open University, and a past President of the Royal Astronomical Society. In addition to many other honours, in 2007, she was appointed as Dame Commander of the British Empire.

PREFACE

Overcoming Prejudice

Even in the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is still harder for women to make a career in science than men, as many of our colleagues can testify. It may be easier than ever for them to get a foot on the ladder, but the higher up that ladder you go, the fewer women (in proportion to men) you will find. Two centuries ago, however, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when science as we know it was just getting started, the situation was far worse. Then, the very notion of a female scientist would have been regarded as something of an oxymoron. Our aim in this book is to highlight the achievements of women who overcame the odds and achieved scientific success (although not always as much success as they deserved) in spite of male prejudice, as society changed over about 150 years, from the middle of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century. This should be seen not only as a cautionary tale about the stifling effects of such prejudice, but as a celebration of those who achieved success against the odds – and maybe as an inspiration for the next generation. With that in mind, our last two chapters focus on two women who achieved success in science roughly at the same time, in the second half of the twentieth century, but did so through lifestyles which represent two extreme ways in which the odds could be overcome. Most women scientists today will find themselves somewhere in the middle ground between those extremes, but we hope through these examples to show just how big that middle ground is. If they can do it, you can do it.

INTRODUCTION

Against the Odds

There’s a group of scientists who achieved some notable firsts over a span of roughly a century and a half. The identification of the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect; the theory of nuclear fission; the mathematics that underpins modern particle physics. The discovery of the Earth’s inner core; the experimental evidence of nuclear fission; what stars are made of; how genes are turned on and off; the molecular structure of penicillin; experiments that established the ‘standard model’ of particle physics; the structure of DNA and viruses; the code that underpins computer operating systems; and the discovery of the dark matter that dominates the Universe. These scientists worked in different places, at different times, and mostly never met one another. So why do we call them a group? Because, of course, they had one thing in common. They were all women, working in a male-dominated environment.

How did they achieve such success, overcoming the hurdles that society placed before them?

Bente Rosenbeck, of the University of Copenhagen, has carried out a study of the lives of Danish female academics between 1875 and 1925, in which she identified four common features.* These apply so closely to the lives of the women discussed in this book – whether Danish or not, and whatever decades they lived in – that it is worth spelling them out.

All the women came from families with either an academic background or money (or both); they all did better than the average man of their cohort in school or university; they all started on an academic path later than their male counterparts; and the great majority never married. In another study, this time of American scientists, Margaret Rossiter, of Cornell University, noted that at least up until 1940 there was a tendency for women to work in jobs that fitted the image society had of appropriate work for girls, but choose work close to the academic area they were interested in.* Many of them were also driven to prove that they were not just equal to, but better than male scientists, often working to the point of exhaustion or illness.

These are common themes of the careers of the scientists discussed in this book, even those working after 1940 in places other than Denmark and the USA. Some aspects feature more strongly in some lives than in others, but all of this could be an identikit description of the early career of Inge Lehmann, the subject of Chapter 4, who might be regarded as the archetypal example. She appears in Chapter 4, not Chapter 1, because we have chosen to arrange our subjects in the order of their birth, to highlight the (gradual!) improvement in opportunities for women scientists; but feel free to start with her if you wish.

* Har videnskaben køn? Kvinder i forskning, Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 2014.

* See bibliography.

CHAPTER

Eunice Newton Foote (17 July 1819–30 September 1888)

Discovered the carbon dioxide greenhouse effect

Most of the women who feature in this book achieved success after overcoming the prejudice against female scientists held by the scientific establishment at large and by most male scientists. Their stories show how these barriers were gradually eroded during the twentieth century. But our first pioneer is something of an anomaly, a woman who made an important scientific discovery in the nineteenth century, although its importance was not appreciated until quite recently. Her success actually highlights the problems of women in science at the time. Far from being a professional physicist working in an academic environment, she was a wealthy amateur who, with the support of her husband, was able to set up her own laboratory and work without any need to satisfy the male hierarchy. She was, though, well aware of her privileged position, and campaigned vigorously not just for women’s rights but for other causes, such as the abolition of slaves. This may have overshadowed her scientific work – which may also have been overlooked partly because of the unfortunate coincidence that she and her husband shared the same initial on their forenames.

Eunice Newton (as she then was) was born on 17 July 1819, in the small town of Goshen, Connecticut. Her father claimed to be a distant relative of Isaac Newton, who had died in 1727, placing her much closer in time to him than to us. The year after Eunice was born, the family moved to Ontario County, in western New York State, where her father owned a farm. She had five brothers and six sisters, one of whom took over the farm after their father died in 1835. We know what she looked like from the description on her 1862 passport application, when she was in her early forties: ‘just under 5 ft 2 in [1.57 m] tall, with blue-gray eyes, a rather large mouth, with an oval face, a sallow complexion, and dark brown hair’.

The region where Eunice grew up was a hotbed of social and political activism, involving campaigns supporting the abolition of slavery, women’s rights and temperance. Reflecting these attitudes, she was educated at a pioneering school called the Troy Female Seminary, founded by the feminist Emma Willard, who believed that women could handle mathematics and science as well as men; to this end, her students attended science classes, including hands-on laboratory work, at the nearby Rensselaer School. The seminary was the first school in the USA to offer higher education for women, including mathematics, science, history, geography and philosophy. Eunice had a grounding in all these subjects, plus French, by the time she graduated in 1838. But there was no career path in science for even a well-educated and scientifically literate woman in those days, and it is no surprise that she married (a lawyer, Elisha Foote), on 12 August 1841, when she was just 22 and he was 32. The marriage produced two daughters, Mary in 1842 and Augusta in 1844.* But Eunice was no conventional housewife, and her partnership with Elisha produced a lot more than children. She was an active women’s rights campaigner and was on the editorial board of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention, the first conference on women’s rights, organised by prominent suffragist Elizabeth Candy Stanton, a friend and neighbour of the Footes. As a member of the editorial committee for the convention, Eunice – and her husband – signed the convention’s Declaration of Sentiments, which demanded social and legal rights equal to those of men, including the right to vote.

Elisha Foote specialised in patent law, and made several inventions of his own. In the 1850s, the family were still living in Seneca County, New York, where the couple were affluent enough to have a scientific laboratory built in their house. There, separately and together, they carried out experiments which were a cut above the usual dabbling of scientifically minded gentlemen (and women) amateurs. One pair of these experiments was reported in two papers, one by Elisha and one by Eunice, read to the tenth annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), held on 23 August 1856 in Albany, New York. The two papers were published later that year in the American Journal of Science and Arts. Eunice’s represents the first known publication on experimental physics by an American woman in a scientific journal (there had been earlier publications by women on observational astronomy), and is the basis for the claim that she was the ‘discoverer’ of the global-warming greenhouse effect.

The two papers are best considered as a pair, since clearly the couple were working on a joint project to study the way the Earth is warmed by the Sun. Elisha reported experiments on the temperatures recorded by thermometers exposed to the sun or shade, inside or outside a room, at various air temperatures. Eunice investigated the effect of the Sun’s rays on different gases, sealed inside two glass containers. Each glass cylinder, four inches in diameter and thirty inches long, contained two thermometers to ensure that the temperature readings were reliable, and the two cylinders could be connected together via an air pump, which she used to empty one cylinder into the other, where it was ‘condensed’, in her terminology. After allowing both cylinders to reach the same temperature in the shade, she then placed them in the Sun and measured the temperature in each cylinder once it had stabilised. She repeated the experiment with wet air and dry air, and with hydrogen or carbon dioxide (known to her as carbonic acid) replacing the air. The results were clearcut. Containers filled with moist air or with carbon dioxide warmed up more than containers filled with dry air, and carbonic acid trapped the most heat, with the temperature in the tube reaching 125°F (52°C).

The fact that containers made of glass could trap solar heat was not in itself a surprise in the 1850s. After all, a room with closed glass windows gets hotter than the air outside when the Sun’s rays pass through the glass. This phenomenon had been studied by the eighteenth-century naturalist Horace de Saussure, who was a native of Geneva and was particularly interested in the meteorology and geology of the Alps. He made a glass box, sometimes called a solar oven, and in 1767 measured the temperature inside when it was exposed to sunlight on the plains of Cournier and on the top of Mount Crammont, 4,852 feet above the plains. In both places the temperature inside the ‘oven’ reached (in modern units) 110°C, although the temperature of the outside air on the mountain top was 19°C lower than that on the plains. This highlighted a widely discussed puzzle of the time – why are valleys warmer than mountains even though mountains are closer to the Sun?

The next step, building on the work of De Saussure, came from the French mathematician and physicist Joseph Fourier in the 1820s. Fourier studied the way heat is transferred between objects, and this enabled him to calculate how hot an airless globe at the same distance from the Sun as the Earth would be if it was solely heated by solar radiation. The temperature he calculated is much lower than the actual average temperature of the Earth – but, of course, the Earth is not airless. Bringing things up to date, we now know that, averaging over day and night and all latitudes, the average temperature of the Moon, which is airless, is about -18°C, while the average temperature of the Earth is about 15°C. Fourier considered several possible reasons for the warmth of the Earth, and favoured the (incorrect) idea that our planet is heated by radiation from space. But he also mentioned De Saussure’s work, and suggested the possibility that the atmosphere of the Earth acts like a blanket around the planet, trapping heat that would otherwise escape into space. In 1824 he came very close to identifying the mechanism by which this works. He wrote ‘the temperature can be augmented by the interposition of the atmosphere, because heat in the state of light finds less resistance in penetrating the air, than in repassing into the air when converted into non-luminous heat’.* This is now widely regarded as the first hint in a scientific publication of what is today called the terrestrial greenhouse effect, although Fourier did not use that term and, crucially, he did not know which gases in the atmosphere ‘resist’ the passage of the outgoing radiation from the warm surface of the Earth.

Eunice Foote’s improvement on this idea was to identify two of the gases which do indeed trap heat – carbon dioxide and water vapour – and then to link this discovery with the idea that the changing concentration of these gases in the air could contribute to climate change. Although she did not give any references in her paper, it is quite likely that she knew of Fourier’s work. She said in the introduction to the 1856 paper: ‘My investigations have had for their object to determine the different circumstances that affect the thermal action of the rays of light that proceed from the sun.’ And after explaining the experimental setup she described what she had observed:

The highest effect of the sun’s rays I have found to be in carbonic acid gas …

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 actions as well as from increased weight would have necessarily resulted.

This is the basis of the suggestion that Foote ‘discovered’ the terrestrial greenhouse effect; but the recognition of how the effect works came just three years later, when the Irish physicist John Tyndall, who was unaware of Foote’s work, carried out a series of experiments at the Royal Institution in London on the absorption of what was then called ‘radiant heat’ (Fourier’s ‘non-luminous heat’, now known as infrared radiation) by gases.

In the early nineteenth century, the astronomer William Herschel had discovered that radiation invisible to human eyes, with longer wavelength than red light (hence the name ‘infrared’), could warm a thermometer. In the 1850s, John Tyndall was an established scientist with a senior position at the Royal Institution, one of the leading scientific research centres of the time, and access to the best experimental apparatus of the day. He was familiar with the work of Herschel, De Saussure and Fourier, and in the spring of 1859 he began a series of experiments to measure the way radiant energy is absorbed by different gases. As a source of infrared radiation, he used a small copper tank containing boiling water at 100°C, with the radiation passing through a long tube which could be filled with different kinds of gas. He could measure both the temperature of the gas and other properties using sensitive detectors. On 26 May that year he wrote to the Royal Society announcing his programme of research ‘on the transmission of radiant heat through gaseous bodies’, pointing out that ‘We know nothing of the effect even of air upon heat radiated from terrestrial sources’, and: ‘With regard to the action of other gases upon heat, we are not, so far as I am aware, possessed of a single experiment.’

Eunice Newton Foote

Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

As well as making it clear that he was unaware of Foote’s work, this hints at a crucial difference between his work and hers. She assumed that the air in her cylinders had been warmed by the Sun’s rays on the way in. We now know that infrared radiation is blocked by glass, so there was little or no direct heating of this kind in her experiments. But when the walls of such a container are warmed, by absorbing solar energy, they emit infrared radiation, and this is what is absorbed by gases such as carbon dioxide and water vapour, raising the temperature of the gas in the tube. Tyndall realised this. On 10 June he demonstrated his first experiments on radiant heat to the Royal Society, and said that although solar heat can get through the atmosphere to warm the surface of the Earth:

when the heat is absorbed by the planet, it is so changed in quality that the rays emanating from the planet cannot get with the same freedom back into space. Thus the atmosphere admits of the entrance of solar heat; but checks its exit, and the result is a tendency to accumulate heat at the surface of the planet.

This, in a nutshell, is what we now call the greenhouse effect. After further research, measuring the ability of many gases, including carbon dioxide, to absorb infrared radiation, Tyndall summed up his work in a major lecture given to the Royal Society in 1861:*

These experiments were commenced in the spring of 1859, and continued without intermission for seven weeks. The course of the inquiry during this whole period was an incessant struggle with experimental difficulties. Approximate results were easily obtainable, but I aimed at exact measurements … With this apparatus I determined approximately the absorption of nine gases and twenty vapours during the summer of 1859.

He also mentioned the possibility that a change in the concentration of gas such as water vapour in the air might cause ‘mutations’ in the climate.

So how come Tyndall knew nothing of Eunice Foote’s work, which was largely forgotten for more than a hundred years? There are several reasons, including the fact that she lived in America, which was very much a scientific backwater in the second half of the nineteenth century. To put this in context, at about the same time that Tyndall began his research on the topic, in 1859, the German scientist Gustav Magnus was carrying out similar experiments in Berlin. But neither of them knew about the other one’s work, until Magnus learned of Tyndall’s first paper nearly two years after it had been published and wrote to him. It is hardly surprising that neither of them knew anything about the work of an amateur female scientist, published in an obscure American journal. But at least Foote’s work did receive some recognition in that backwater.

Although Elisha Foote read his own paper to the AAAS meeting in 1856, Eunice’s paper was presented on her behalf by Joseph Henry, the first director of the Smithsonian Institution. There was no rule forbidding women from speaking at the meetings of the Society, but it would have been unusual, and we do not know whether she was actually present at the meeting. Having Henry read her paper may have indicated its merit to the audience, but, unfortunately, Henry prefaced his presentation with comments drawing attention to the fact that the author was a woman, rather than concentrating on the scientific results. His remarks were recorded by David Wells, the editor of a journal called The Annual of Scientific Discovery, who reported in his 1857 volume (looking back to 1856):*

Prof. Henry then read a paper by Mrs. Eunice Foote, 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. Mrs. Foote had determined, first, that the action of the rays increases with the density of the air. She has taken two glass cylinders of the same size, containing thermometers. Into one the air was condensed, and from the other air was exhausted. When they were of the same temperature the cylinders were placed side by side in the sun, and the thermometers in the condensed air rose more than twenty degrees higher than those in the rarified air. This effect of rarefaction must contribute to produce the feebleness of heating power in the sun’s rays on the summits of lofty mountains. Secondly, the effect of the sun’s rays is greater in moist than in dry air. In one cylinder the air was saturated with moisture, in the other dried with chloride of lime; both were placed in the sun, and a difference of about twelve degrees was observed. This high temperature of sunshine in moist air is frequently noticed; for instance, in the intervals between summer showers. The isothermal lines on the earth’s surface are doubtless affected by the moisture of the air giving power to the sun, as well as by the temperature of the ocean yielding the moisture. Thirdly, a high effect of the sun’s rays is produced in carbonic acid gas. One receiver being filled with carbonic acid, the other with common air, the temperature of the gas in the sun was raised twenty degrees above that of the air. The receiver containing the gas became very sensibly hotter than the other, and was much longer in cooling. An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a much higher temperature; and if there once was, as some suppose, a larger proportion of that gas in the air, an increased temperature must have accompanied it, both from the nature of the gas and the increased density of the atmosphere. Mrs. Foote had also tried the heating effect of the sun’s rays on hydrogen and oxygen, and found the former to be less, the latter more, susceptible to the heating action of sunlight.

The September 1856 issue of Scientific American was also impressed that a woman could be a scientist. An article on ‘Scientific Ladies – Experiments with Condensed Gases’ focused on her work, commenting ‘This we are happy to say has been done by a lady’ who ‘was deeply acquainted with almost every branch of physical science’ and ‘the experiments of Mrs. Foot [sic] afford abundant evidence of the ability of woman to investigate any subject with originality and precision’. The work was also mentioned in the New-York Daily Tribune and in both a German review of the year’s science and in the Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal, although neither of them included her conclusions about carbon dioxide and climate. The Edinburgh journal also gives us a hint of why Eunice’s work received less attention than it might have. It refers to two papers, one by Elisha Foote and one by ‘Mrs Elisha Foote’. And although it only gives the title of Elisha’s paper (‘On the Heat in the Sun’s Rays’) it mostly describes her work! The report is so short that it is worth presenting in full:

On the Heat of the Sun’s Rays. By Elisha Foote. On the Heat of the Sun’s Rays. By Mrs Elisha Foote. Read by Professor Henry: These papers described experiments from which it was inferred, that the heating power of the sun’s rays varies with the temperature of the place into which the rays fall, that the temperature of air is raised by sunshine passing through it, that in the same condition rarefied air is less heated than that which is condensed, moist air more than dry air, carbonic acid gas more than atmospheric air, and oxygen more than hydrogen gas.

The reader might naturally assume that, at best, she was Elisha’s assistant.

Whatever the reasons for Foote’s 1856 paper failing to make much impact, the following year she made a breakthrough of greater significance in the history of women in science, showing that she was no one-hit wonder. After her experiments on the thermal properties of gases, Foote turned her attention to their electrical properties. She used an air pump to vary the pressure of gases in a glass tube about two feet long and three inches in diameter (not the same as the tubes used in her earlier experiments) and measured the ability of different gases, at different pressures, to hold a charge of static electricity. The gases she tested were dry and damp air, oxygen, hydrogen and carbon dioxide, and the electric charge was measured using a device called an electrometer, where two thin gold leaves were pushed apart by electric repulsion. Her paper, titled ‘On a New Source of Electrical Excitation’, was presented on her behalf by Henry at the 1857 meeting of the AAAS, on 14 August that year, in Montreal. Unlike her earlier paper, this one was published in the more prestigious Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in November 1857. It was the first publication on physics by a woman in that journal. Also unlike the 1856 paper, this time Foote included references to earlier work by other scientists, including the Frenchmen Joseph Gay-Lussac (who discovered that water is made of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen) and Jean-Baptiste Biot (who proved that meteorites are rocks from space), showing that she had read their papers and had much more than a dilettante interest in the subject.

Foote’s results showed that the amount of static electricity generated in her tube was related to the moisture of the air, and that she could change the moisture content by expanding or compressing the air. The opening line of her paper reads: ‘I have ascertained that the compression or the expansion of atmospheric air produces an electrical excitation’, and she elaborates that:

My experiments with this apparatus have extended over about eight months, and I have found the action to bear a strong analogy to that of the electrical machine. In damp or warm weather little or no effect would be produced, whilst at other times, particularly in clear cold weather, the action would be so strong as to diverge the leaves of the electrometer to their utmost extent. In warm weather when no action would be produced, I have attained the result by cooling the air artificially. A sudden expansion or contraction always increases the effect.

She also points out the importance of this in understanding the behaviour of the atmosphere of the Earth:

Particularly should this be observed in the dry cold regions of our atmosphere above the effects of moisture and vapors; and it was established by the experiments of Becquerel as well as those of Gay Lussac and Biot that the electricity of the atmosphere increases in strength with the altitude.

This paper, published in a more prestigious journal, attracted greater attention in Europe and was reprinted in the Philosophical Magazine in 1858.* Tyndall must surely have seen it, but there is nothing in the paper to connect it with her earlier paper. This, however, is the last we hear of Eunice Foote the scientist, until, thanks to the second paper, her name begins to be noticed by historians in the last quarter of the twentieth century, and then the significance of her paper on atmospheric warming becomes recognised in the first quarter of the twenty-first century. We don’t know why she stopped doing scientific experiments – indeed, we don’t know why, or when, she started doing them. But there may be a clue in the fact that sometime in the late 1850s, Elisha and his family moved from Seneca Falls to Saratoga Springs, where he developed his practice in patent law. Both Elisha and Eunice patented several inventions over the years that followed, so her attention may have shifted from the abstract to the practical.

In 1865, Elisha was appointed to a post at the US Patent and Trademark Office, and the family moved on to Washington, DC, where he rose through the ranks to serve as commissioner of patents from July 1868 until 1869. Their daughter Mary married in 1868, and her sister, Augusta, the following year. After several career-related moves, with the children having long since left home, the couple were living in New York City by 1881. Elisha died in 1883, and Eunice at Lenox, Massachusetts, on 30 September 1888.

As the first time an American woman’s work on physics was published in a major journal, Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, her 1857 paper, although her second published paper, is the more significant in terms of the impact of women breaking down barriers in science, even though its subject matter is of less scientific importance today. In the whole of the nineteenth century, only sixteen physics papers were published by American women; and the only two published before 1889 were those by Eunice Foote. In 2022, the American Geophysical Union established The Eunice Newton Foote Medal for Earth-Life Science, awarded to recognise important scientific research on the links between Earth- and life- sciences.

The important message to take away from all this is not who was the first person to suggest the existence of a terrestrial greenhouse effect. As is often the case in science, several people were working along similar lines at about the same time. The significance of Eunice Foote’s story is that it is an early example of the truth that, given the opportunity, women can do science just as well as men. The Scientific American article made the same point: ‘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.’

* Like her mother, Mary became an active campaigner for women’s and other rights. She married John B. Henderson, the senator from Missouri who introduced the amendment to the Constitution that abolished slavery. Henderson was also one of the seven Republicans who voted against the impeachment of President Andrew Johnson. Mary died in July 1931, a week short of her 89th birthday.

* See http://fourier1824.geologist-1011.mobi/

* J. Tyndall, ‘The Bakerian Lecture: on the absorption and radiation of heat by gases and vapours, and on the physical connexion of radiation, absorption, and conduction’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, volume 151, pages 28–29 (1861).

*Annual of scientific discovery: or, year-book of facts in science and art, for 1857, Gould and Lincoln, Boston, 1857.

* Where her name was given as ‘Mrs Elisha Foote’! Philosophical Magazine, volume15, pages 239–40, 1858.

CHAPTER

Lise Meitner (7 November 1878–27 October 1968)

Explained the process of nuclear fission

Lise Meitner was born at just the right time to push open the door preventing women from becoming professional research scientists. But this accident of birth also meant that for complicated reasons not entirely related to her gender, her greatest contribution to physics did not receive due recognition when it was carried out, and her place in history is still often overlooked in favour of a male colleague. There are many examples of the Nobel Committee failing to recognise work worthy of their notice. Even Albert Einstein’s work on relativity was overlooked, although he did receive the Prize for another contribution. But Meitner’s is perhaps the clearest example* of someone unjustly deprived of the accolades due to her – not least because the male colleague did get the Prize for their joint work, in which if anything she was the team leader.

Meitner was born in Vienna in November 1878. She came from an essentially secular Jewish family, and her birth was noted in the records of their community as the 17th of that month, but in all other documents the date is given as 7 November, which was the date on which she always celebrated her birthday. Her paternal ancestors came from a village called Meiethein, in what is now the Czech Republic, from which the surname Meitner derived. Her mother’s family descended from Jews who had fled Russia to avoid persecution. Philipp and Hedwig Meitner, who married in 1873, had eight children, Lise (initially known as Elise) being the third, and the youngest, Walter, arriving in 1891.

At that time, the Austrian laws forbade women from attending university, or even from receiving any education beyond the age of fourteen. Just before she reached that age, in the summer of 1892, Lise left school with no prospects except marriage or becoming a teacher in a subject, such as French, which did not require an advanced education. For five years, Lise was stuck at home, helping with domestic duties. Then, in 1897, under pressure from feminist activists, the government relented. It was decreed that women would be allowed to enter universities to study, provided they passed the Matura, the standard school-leaving examination, whether or not they had attended the Gymnasium (High School). After finishing a teacher-training course as a backup, Lise began cramming for the Matura with two other girls, supervised by a physicist from the University of Vienna. In July 1901 she was one of fourteen women who took the exam; only four passed – her cohort of three and Henriette Boltzmann, the daughter of a famous physicist. In October, Meitner began studying science at the University of Vienna. The quality of the physics teaching there was first class. In the first year, she was taught by Franz Exner, a pioneering researcher in the medical applications of X-rays, and from her second year onwards she was under the influence of Henriette Boltzmann’s father, Ludwig, who had explained the laws of thermodynamics in terms of the behaviour of atoms and molecules, and who was an inspirational teacher. She became hooked on physics for its own sake, whether or not there was any prospect of a career in science.

In Vienna at that time the university operated slightly differently from the way universities operate today. After she finished her coursework in the summer of 1905, Meitner was able to spend a few months working on an experimental research project, under the supervision of Franz Exner, which led to the award of a doctorate in February 1906; this would be about equivalent to an MPhil today.*