August 23 · This Day in America
At the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Albany, a short paper titled "Circumstances Affecting the Heat of the Sun's Rays" is presented. Its author, Eunice Newton Foote, an amateur scientist and suffragist from New York, is not allowed to read it herself — a woman cannot address the assembly — so a Smithsonian professor reads it for her. The findings are quietly historic. Foote had filled glass cylinders with different gases and set them in the sun. The cylinder of carbon dioxide grew far hotter and held its heat longest. From this she reasoned that an atmosphere richer in that gas "would give to our earth a high temperature." It is the first known statement of what we now call the greenhouse effect — written three years before the man usually credited with it. Forgotten for 150 years. Right all along.
Source: www.aps.org
Also on this day · 1784
Four mountain counties in western North Carolina, fed up with a distant government and worried about being traded away to settle the nation's debts, secede and declare themselves the independent State of Franklin — named to flatter Benjamin, who politely declined to help. Franklin elected a governor and a legislature and lasted about four years before collapsing back into North Carolina. The land would become Tennessee. For a moment, America briefly had a fourteenth state nobody recognized.
Source: www.tn.gov
“An atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature.”Eunice Newton Foote, 1856