This list of notable men omits an important person: the woman who studied the greenhouse effect several years before Tyndall. Eunice Foote was a physicist, inventor and women’s rights advocate from Seneca Falls, New York. In 1856, she shared her paper, “Circumstances affecting the heat of the sun’s rays,” at the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s annual meeting.

As described in Smithsonian Magazine, “Foote’s paper demonstrated the interactions of the sun’s rays on different gases through a series of experiments using an air pump, four thermometers, and two glass cylinders.” She tested “hydrogen, common air and CO2, all heated after being exposed to the sun.”

The cylinder with CO2 trapped more heat and stayed hot longer. “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…must have necessarily resulted,” she wrote — an early connection between atmospheric CO2 and global warming.

Why were these men recognized while Foote gets so little credit? Tyndall is often lauded for discovering the effects of small changes in atmospheric gas composition on climate and, indeed, his work contributed greatly to our understanding. But Foote carried out comparable experiments and came to similar conclusions three years earlier.

At the time, women didn’t have the same opportunities in science as men. Foote was considered an “amateur,” while Tyndall had a prestigious scientific education and access to equipment, facilities and other experts. Foote didn’t even present her own paper at the AAAS meeting.