Mary Walton was an American independent inventor who worked in the late 1800s. In 1879, Walton created a method for reducing the environmental hazards of the smoke emitted from factory smokestacks. Walton's system, patent #221,880 deflected the emissions being produced into water tanks, where the pollutants were retained and then flushed into the city sewage system. She also invented sound dampeners for New York's elevated railroad system that dampened the noise caused by trains running over the tracks by cradling the tracks in a wooden box lined with cotton and filled with sand.[1]
References
- ^ MIT.edu. http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/walton.html Inventor of the week November 1996. - Retrieved: May 12, 2007
