Ébelmen and Urey theorized that rocks, the atmosphere, and oceans were linked by the movement of carbon through them. It’s hard to overestimate how ahead of its time Ébelmen’s idea was in 1846: there was little understanding of the age of the Earth, nothing was known of how rocks weather, and his understanding of the carbon content of volcanic gases was guesswork. The world simply wasn’t ready for his idea. It would have been as if somebody had sketched a design for a smartphone in the 1800s—lacking any context, the idea would languish.
