Lindsay H. Metcalf stands in front of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton house in Seneca Falls. Eunice Newton Foote lived in the town with her husband, Elisha. They were neighbors and friends of Stanton and Eunice was a women’s rights activist who was part of the historic 1848 Seneca Falls Convention.
A painting shows an unidentified woman that Lindsay H. Metcalf makes a strong case for being the only known image of Eunice Newton Foote, a pioneering climate scientist who died in 1888. Her pioneering discoveries on the greenhouse effect were overlooked because she was a woman.
ALBANY– If there were any justice in the male-dominated world of 19th-century science, Eunice Newton Foote would be as well-known as Joseph Henry.
Henry pioneered the construction of strong electromagnets in 1827 while teaching at Albany Academy and was honored with a bronze statue in front of the former school in Academy Park. He was named the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution.
In 1856, Foote, who was educated at the Troy Female Seminary (Emma Willard today), demonstrated that carbon dioxide and water vapor could trap heat, thus predicting global warming. That was three years before Irish scientist John Tyndall made a similar discovery, although he is widely credited as “the father of the greenhouse effect.”
References to her research were written as if she did not have a first name and were credited to Mrs. Elisha Foote. Her husband was an attorney and scientist who met Henry as a student at Albany Academy.
Women were not permitted to present their discoveries at scientific meetings in that era. Henry presented Eunice Foote’s groundbreaking paper, “Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun’s Rays,” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in 1856.
As a woman, Foote was relegated to scientific inquiry’s forgotten margins. She was literally pushed out of the frame so there are no verified photographs or paintings of her.
By contrast, her contemporary male scientists appeared en masse in images of the period, including in a famous painting of the dedication of Albany’s– Dudley Observatory on August 28, 1856, in the collection of the Albany Institute of History and Art.
A former reporter for the Kansas City Star (Ernest Hemingway’s paper) undertook dogged research to bring Eunice Newton Foote out of the shadows and into the light while correcting an omission of history.
“Eunice didn’t think of herself as a climate scientist because that term was not around then, but that is what she was. I wanted to write her back into the historical record because she had been left out,” said Lindsay H. Metcalf, author of “Footeprint: Eunice Newton Foote at the Dawn of Climate Science and Women’s Rights.” It is a novel-in-verse aimed at a young adult audience. Metcalf will give a presentation and sign books at the Albany Institute of History and Art at 2 p.m. Sunday. The program requires admission to the museum.
“I was impressed with the amount of research Lindsay did and her extensive source notes,” said Diane Shewchuk, chief curator at the Albany Institute of History & Art. She met with Metcalf in 2023 and they inspected the Dudley Observatory dedication painting by Tompkins Harrison Matteson. They tried to determine if it was, indeed, Eunice Foote, squeezed in among dozens of men in the back row of the group portrait.
“Because of Eunice’s forced invisibility as a woman, as of this writing in 2025, nobody is sure what she looked like,” Metcalf writes at the end of the book.
The mystery of trying to verify an image of Eunice Foote was part of the challenge that set the former reporter on a sleuthing quest. She lays out strong evidence that it is Eunice in the painting next to her husband Elisha, although historians remain divided on Metcalf’s findings.
“After the time I spent with Lindsay, she convinced me that it is Eunice in that painting,” Shewchuk said. “What’s more important is that Eunice’s achievements are being rediscovered after being overlooked for so long.”
Metcalf, 44, lives in Concordia, Kan., near her family’s farm with her husband, a network security engineer, and their two teenage sons. Her family harvests corn, soybeans, sorghum and wheat.
Metcalf majored in journalism at the University of Kansas and covered education and edited a lifestyle magazine at the Kansas City Star before she left newspaper work to raise her sons and to write picture books for young elementary students.
“I stumbled across Eunice’s name in a blog post,” Metcalf said. “I wanted to write longer than the 32 pages of a picture book. Eunice has a lot of layers that are interesting to kids today who have never heard of her.”
Paul Grondahl is the Opalka Endowed Director of the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany and a former Times Union reporter. He can be reached at grondahlpaul@gmail.com.
