Mary Walton

Mary Elizabeth Walton was a nineteenth-century American inventor who was awarded two patents for pollution-reducing devices. In 1881, Walton created a method for reducing the environmental hazards of the smoke emitted from locomotive, industrial and residential chimneys. Her system deflected the emissions being produced by factory smokestacks into water tanks, where the pollutants were retained and later flushed "into the sewer, or into other suitable channels for conducting them to a distant or any desired locality". This water tank system redirected smoke, odors, and pollutants away from the city and out of the air before society had even come to an understanding of the problem. The extent of the problem was a dark cloud that hung in the air and an unpleasant odor, yet Walton inadvertently also helped to reduce air pollution and cancer-causing coal smoke.

Mary Walton also invented a system for reducing the noise produced by the elevated railway systems that were rapidly expanding in New York City, where she lived near the Sixth Avenue Line. Walton had chosen to pursue a solution after hearing that young Thomas Edison had tried and failed. After experimentation and research, she was able to narrow down that much of the sound was a result of amplification from wooden support boxes. To test various solutions, she built a model of the tracks in her basement. From these tests, she determined that lining the boxes with cotton and filling them with sand served to effectively dampen the sound of the trains. Her system deadened the noise caused by trains running over the tracks by cradling the tracks in a wooden box lined with cotton and filled with sand. The rights to her invention, patented in 1881, were sold to the Metropolitan Railroad for $10,000 and the system was soon adopted by other elevated railway companies. Her idea of using sand to dampen sound pollution in New York was inspired by the use of sand to dampen the clanging of anvils near her home. Mary Walton was a true innovator, noticing and experiencing problems in her life and targeting that as a way to make the world a better place. Provided by Wikipedia