Ellen Swallow Richards

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PRESENTER: Safe drinking water, it's one of the great luxuries here in the United States, and the person we owe much of that to is Ellen Swallow Richards. She was the first woman to graduate from MIT. She taught Sanitary Chemistry, but what she's most famous for is a phenomenal study of the quality of water in the state of Massachusetts. She collected some 20 thousand samples. Carefully documenting the results, she transformed water quality standards for the nation.

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