Mary Walton

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".

[1] This water tank system redirected smoke, odors, and pollutants away from the city and out of the air before society had even come to a true understanding of the problem.

[6] 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.

Aside from manufacturing pollution, new elevated trains that transported employees into and out of cities produced loud noise and emitted poisonous smoke along the rails.

Mary Walton, a woman in the working class, experienced the effects of this problem daily as she lived alongside tracks.

[8] Innovation is problem solving, and Walton experienced the pain point to a greater extent than Edison, likely contributing to her insistence to generate a solution.

After its adoption in New York, Walton traveled to England to promote her pollution deterrent and noise blocker, as she was aware of the dark cloud that hung over London throughout their Industrial Revolution.

[13] However, there are still some elevated railways in Chicago, and Walton's technology has been adopted both domestically and internationally, meaning that while it's not to the same extent it was in her lifetime, remnants of her patented solutions to pollution and noise still exist today.

[14] Understanding of the issues of air pollution and constant noise on the environment and the human body has grown significantly today, revealing the inadvertent positive impacts that Walton had on her society.

She was ahead of her time in engineering ability, in gender roles, and in air quality and pollution prevention, and she still has yet to receive the attention she so rightfully deserves.

Early Life: Mary Elizabeth Walton was a nineteenth- century American inventor and environmentalist who was awarded two patents for pollution-reducing devices.

However in 1884 a statement was published in the weekly Transcript of Lexington, Kentucky regarding Mary and her youth, “My father had no sons, and believed in educating his daughters.

This shows how her father advocated and pushed his daughters to be able to get some sort of education, in the bold world of cultural differences and tough period for women.

This led the city to establish new elevated trains to transport employees and this produced loud noise and emitted poisonous smoke from the rails.

Moreover, through her innovation, she raised awareness on how constant loud noise from railcars can lead to many health and physical issues such as hearing loss, stress, anxiety, high blood pressure, and heart disease.