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.
Early life
There is little documentation of Mary Walton’s life. As a woman inventor, she was woefully overlooked as a person and she is a bit of an enigma in how she was capable of creating two beneficial inventions as a woman in the 1880s. However, a statement made in 1884 and published in the Weekly Transcript of Lexington, Kentucky, provides some crucial information about her youth. Walton is quoted as saying, “My father had no sons, and believed in educating his daughters. He spared no pains or expense to this end". Still, while this provides some insight to her youth, there is no record of her having received a formal education, much less one focused on environmental engineering. The culture and time period made it a challenge for a woman to receive any education; it would seem impossible that she received a specialized education in a STEM field.
Innovations
The Industrial Revolution, which began in the late 1860s after the Civil War, drove workers and immigrants to cities like New York in search of industrial jobs. Smokestacks billowed heavy plumes of smoke into the air, while factory jobs improved livelihoods. 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 ran a boarding house in New York City in 1879, which was right across from the elevated train. Walton decided to handle the problems herself, disgusted by the dark smoke and roar of the railway engines.
Walton's invention (patent #221,880) diverted smokestack pollutants into water tanks, where they were kept until they were discharged into the city's sewage system. Walton went on to address the rattling and clanging noises from the elevated trains a few years later. New York City even enlisted the help of America's most famous inventors, including Thomas Edison, to find a solution. However, it was not renowned inventor Thomas Edison that was able to solve the problem. Mary Walton, a woman in the working class, experienced the effects of this problem daily as she lived alongside tracks. Her boarding house at 6th Avenue and 12th Street was against the city’s new Gilbert Elevated Railway. 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.