Ellen H. Swallow Richards was, in many respects, the original 'Godmother' of our nation's environmental movement (circa late 1800's). In 1873, she became the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's first woman graduate. She had been a student of chemistry with intention of applying science to the improvement of human life. She assisted her professor in setting up a laboratory in the new discipline of "sanitary chemistry" and in 1884 (fully eight years before William Thompson Sedgwick [i.e., 'Godfather' of the US environmental movement; PhD in 1892 from The Johns Hopkins University's biology department] joined the faculty at Harvard to begin his own 'sanitary' movement) was appointed to the MIT faculty as instructor in this field. In this position, she taught the analysis of food, water, sewage, and air to pioneer sanitary engineers who eventually set up laboratories based on her model. Richards is especially remembered for her work in surveying the water resources for the Massachusetts State Board of Health. Along with Thomas M. Drown, she analyzed more than 100,000 samples of the state's water and sewage over a two year period. The project's success was in large measure due to her efforts in supervising the analysis of water samples, developing new laboratory techniques and apparatus, and keeping the records. The Drown and Richards' sanitary survey produced the world's first water purity tables, established the first state water quality standards in the United States, and resulted in the world's initial modern sewage treatment testing laboratory, the Lawrence Experiment Station in Lowell, Massachusetts. (For a more complete report on Richards' life, see Robert Clarke's Ellen Swallow: The Woman Who Founded Ecology, Chicago, 1973.)