By Rebecca Donnelly
The true story of the American woman who ran a simple jar experiment in the 1850s and figured out, before anyone else, that our air can warm the whole planet.
Long before anyone talked about climate change, a curious woman named Eunice Newton Foote was doing science at a time when almost no women were allowed to. She set glass jars of different gases in the sun and watched a thermometer to see which one heated up the most. The jar with carbon dioxide got the hottest and stayed hot the longest, and from that small, careful test she guessed something enormous: more of that gas in the air would make the earth warmer. A man read her findings aloud at a big scientists' meeting because a woman couldn't, and then, for a very long time, the world forgot her name.
It takes a huge idea, the one behind everything we now say about a warming planet, and shows a child where it actually started: one woman, some jars, and a thermometer. Mercè López's art is warm and bright, and the science stays small enough to hold. What lands hardest is that Eunice got it right and got left out anyway because she was a woman, so your child comes away knowing both a real discovery and the plain unfairness of who got remembered for it.