Oliver Evans

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Oliver Evans was born on the 13th of September 1755 in Newport, Delaware, to a cordwainer father who soon moved his family to a farm on the Red Clay Creek. Somewhere between that rural upbringing and a Philadelphia foundry named after the Roman god of war, Evans would quietly change the way the world makes things. He built the first fully automated industrial production line before steam engines were common sights in America. He designed the first high-pressure steam engine in the United States. He sketched a working refrigerator decades before one was built. And in 1805 he drove a seventeen-ton steam-powered dredge through the streets of Philadelphia. Yet his name never entered common memory alongside James Watt or Robert Fulton. The question of why that happened is as revealing as the inventions themselves.

• 2. A Candle and a Wheelwright

  ›

  Evans was apprenticed to a wheelwright and wagon-maker in Newport at age 17, under a master described as illiterate and extremely frugal. The man forbade Evans the use of candles to read by in the evenings, so Evans collected wood scraps and shavings during the day to fuel small fires for light at night. That habit of finding workarounds would define his career. By age 22 he had moved out of wheel-making and into the specialty trade of forming fine wire for textile cards, devices used to comb fibers before spinning. Wanting to speed up that process, he designed a machine that bent wire into teeth and cut them rapidly. George Latimer, then a justice of the peace in Newport, recognized its potential and had a blacksmith build it. When it was introduced in 1778, it could produce around 1,500 teeth every minute. Evans could not find financial backing to commercialize the invention, but over the next two decades it would inspire other pioneers of mechanized textile-card production, including Giles Richards and Amos Whittemore, who are thought to have borrowed heavily from his original designs.

• 3. The Automated Mill

  ›

  In 1783, two of Evans's brothers began building a mill on the family's farm estate on the Red Clay Creek in Newport, and Evans was brought in to oversee construction. When the mill opened in 1785 it was conventional, but Evans spent the next five years redesigning it from the ground up. The central problem in flour milling at the time was labor: moving grain from stage to stage required constant human effort, and cooling the meal after grinding was done by shoveling it manually across large floors. Evans's answer was a bucket elevator to lift grain, borrowed in concept from Roman water-raising technology but carefully re-engineered for grain. He paired it with what he called the hopper boy, a mechanical rake that revolved around a drying floor, evening out freshly deposited meal and nudging it slowly toward central chutes. Neither device was unprecedented on its own. What was unprecedented was Evans's insistence that the entire mill operate as a single continuous process with no human intervention at all between stages. James Latimer, a Newport flour merchant, reportedly laughed at the scheme, saying Evans could not make water run uphill or wooden millers. His son George, however, helped Evans secure patent protection for the designs in 1787 and 1788. The breakthrough Evans needed came in 1789 when the Ellicott family of Baltimore invited him to refit their mills on the Patapsco River. Working with Jonathan Ellicott, Evans added a modified Archimedean screw as a horizontal conveyor and then a rake-drill and conveyor belt, completing a full set of materials handling machines. Miller Joseph Tatnall converted his mills to the Evans system and estimated that in one year the changes saved his operation $37,000. Local Brandywine millers quickly followed, and in 1790 Evans was granted the third US patent, with his application personally examined and approved by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of War Henry Knox, and Attorney-General Edmund Randolph.

• 4. The Young Mill-wright

  ›

  After securing patent protection, Evans moved his family from Wilmington to Philadelphia in 1793 and opened a store for milling supplies. He had intended to write a brief pamphlet for millers but became so absorbed in the project that it grew into a comprehensive book on milling technology, at times neglecting his family's finances to finish it. The Young Mill-wright and Miller's Guide appeared in 1795 with a subscribers' list headed by George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Edmund Randolph. The book ran to fifteen printed editions between 1795 and 1860 and remained the standard guidebook for American milling until after the Civil War. Thomas Ellicott contributed a section on mill construction. Evans's approach to the theoretical sections was characteristically direct: when the existing theory of waterwheels did not match what he observed in practice, he revised the theory to fit practice, stating that "neither the old or new theories agree with practice, therefore we must suspect that they are founded on error." Washington was so impressed by the Evans machinery he encountered at Tatnall's mills in Brandywine Village in 1790 that he had his own gristmill at Mount Vernon converted to the Evans system in 1791, the conversion overseen by Evans's brothers.

• 5. High Pressure and the Oruktor

  ›

  Evans had filed for a Delaware state patent on a steam-powered wagon as early as 1783, when he was 27, but the application was denied because he had no working model. By 1801 he returned to steam in earnest, aware that British engineer Richard Trevithick was pursuing similar ideas but assumed to have worked independently of him. The core insight Evans and Trevithick shared was that high-pressure steam, long feared by earlier engineers, was the only way to build engines small enough and powerful enough to propel a vehicle. James Watt had resisted high-pressure designs and reportedly wanted Trevithick imprisoned over them. Evans ignored those fears. His first working engine, completed in 1803, used a double-acting cylinder six inches in diameter with a piston stroke of eighteen inches. The flywheel and crosshead were made of wood to simplify construction. Its output was approximately five horsepower, modest compared to the twelve horsepower produced by the nearby Philadelphia waterworks engine, but that waterworks machine was over twenty-five times larger in volume. Evans unveiled the engine at his store, put it to work sawing marble slabs, and the Philadelphia newspaper Aurora declared it opened "a new era in the history of the steam engine." In 1805, the Philadelphia Board of Health contracted Evans to build a steam-powered dredge. The resulting Oruktor Amphibolos, or Amphibious Digger, was a flat-bottomed scow nearly thirty feet long, twelve feet wide, and weighing seventeen tons. To move it to the Schuylkill River, Evans mounted the hull on four wheels and drove it through Philadelphia streets on the 13th of July 1805. The first set of wheels collapsed under the weight; a second set was fitted. The craft is considered the first automobile in the United States and the first motorized amphibious vehicle in the world, though its land-propulsion over any significant distance remains doubtful given the engine's limited capacity. The Board of Health scrapped it for parts in 1808 after it proved ineffective as a dredger.

• 6. The Mars Works and the Columbian

  ›

  Evans founded the Mars Works on a large site a few blocks north of his Philadelphia store to produce steam engines at commercial scale. The name, after the Roman god of war, was intended as a challenge to the Soho Foundry near Birmingham, England, which built the famous Watt and Boulton engines. At its peak the Mars Works had over thirty-five staff, operated its own steam engine, and could produce working steam engines alongside cast iron fittings, milling machinery, and farming equipment. During the War of 1812 it cast naval cannons. In one industrial commission for wool processing factories in Middletown, Connecticut, Evans designed a network of pipes and radiators to heat the factory using exhaust from the engines he built for it. Around 1812 Evans introduced his most sophisticated design, the Columbian Engine, named as a patriotic gesture. Its horizontal orientation allowed the crankshaft and piston rod to work together at one end of the machine, eliminating the heavy working beam of older designs. A new linkage still known as the Evans straight-line linkage guided the piston rod in a straight line. In 1813 Evans added a condenser to the Columbian, cutting its running costs and making it as efficient as low-pressure Watt-Boulton designs while remaining cheaper and smaller. Within a year, 27 Columbian engines were operating or under construction in applications from sawmilling and grain milling to the manufacture of paper, wire, and wool. His son George had moved to Pittsburgh in 1809 to operate the Pittsburgh Steam Flour Mill, and in 1811 Evans, George, and engineer Luther Stephens founded the Pittsburgh Steam Engine Company to serve growing demand in the interior. Notable river steamboats built by the Pittsburgh and Mars Works included the Franklin, the Aetna, and the Pennsylvania. A fourth vessel, christened the Oliver Evans but later renamed the Constitution, was lost along with eleven crew members when its boiler exploded near Point Coupee, Louisiana.

• 7. Patent Wars and Isolation

  ›

  Evans's original flour-milling patent expired in January 1805, but he petitioned Congress for an extension and in January 1808 President Jefferson signed An Act for the Relief of Oliver Evans, reviving the expired patent and granting it another fourteen years. Evans and his agents immediately began collecting royalties from millers who had adopted his technology during the three-year gap between patent terms, significantly raising the license fees in the process. The most contentious case began in 1809 when Evans sued a miller near Baltimore named Samuel Robinson, who produced a very modest amount of flour, for damages of $2,500. The sum was widely seen as punishing, and when the case was finally heard in 1812, much of the Baltimore community showed up in support of Robinson. Witnesses argued that bucket chains and Archimedean screws were ancient devices that Evans had merely modified. A retired Thomas Jefferson wrote to both sides, questioning what truly defined invention while ultimately defending the principle of patent law, noting that everyone had access to those ancient devices but only Evans had combined them into an automatic mill. The jury found for Evans, but he reduced his claim against Robinson to $1,000. Evans lost significant standing in the milling community in the process. A leading Philadelphia merchant had already characterized him in 1802 as a "pompous blockhead" whom few millers would credit with useful inventions. In 1817 Evans wrote that his time was "wholly engrossed by law suits," and at the height of his legal campaigns he employed fifteen lawyers simultaneously across the country. During a particularly bitter court dispute in 1809, Evans dramatically burned many of his schematics and papers in open court. The Patent Act of 1836, passed years after his death, would finally address many of the definitional questions his cases had raised.

• 8. Refrigeration and Unbuilt Dreams

  ›

  In the postscript to his Steam Engineer's Guide, Evans noted that drawing a vacuum on water lowers its boiling point and cools it, and that the same effect on ether could produce sufficient cooling to make ice. He then described a piston vacuum pump to achieve this and showed that the compression stroke should produce heat in a condenser. In doing so he had identified all the major components of a vapor-compression refrigeration cycle: expander, cooling coil, compressor, and condenser. He never built a working model, but his colleague Jacob Perkins would later develop a refrigeration device for which he received patents in 1834-1835, employing much the same principles. Evans's later list of unfinished inventions, compiled in his final years and since lost, reportedly ran to eighty items. Among those that are known: a scheme for gas lighting of cities, a means for raising sunken ships, a machine gun, a self-oiling shaft bearing, various gearshift designs for steam carriages, a dough-kneading machine, a perpetual baking oven, and, in 1814, a proposal for a steam-powered frigate as the British Navy threatened Washington during the War of 1812. In 1816 his wife Sarah died. Evans remarried in April 1818 to Hetty Ward, the daughter of a New York innkeeper, and spent his last years in New York. In early 1819 he developed an inflammation of the lungs. Four days before his death, on the 11th of April, news reached him that the Mars Works had burned to the ground. He died on the 15th of April 1819. His body was eventually moved several times after the church where he was first buried was sold, and in 1890 it came to rest in an unmarked common grave at Trinity Cemetery on Broadway at 157th Street in New York City. Industrial historian Sigfried Giedion would later conclude that Evans, in his work on automation, "opens a new chapter in the history of mankind."