Industrial Revolutionary


Oliver Evans did not live to see railroads. He died in 1819, and the first real American railroad line, the Baltimore & Ohio, was begun only in 1828.

But in another sense he saw railroads very clearly indeed. Just look at what he wrote in 1813: “The time will come when people will travel in stages [i.e., stagecoaches] moved by steam engines, from one city to another, almost as fast as birds fly....A carriage will set out from Washington in the morning, the passenger will breakfast in Baltimore, dine at Philadelphia and sup at New York on the same day....To accomplish this, two sets of railways will be guide the carriage, so that they may pass each other in different directions and travel by night as well as by day.”

Oliver Evans not only foresaw railroads, he described precisely how modern refrigerators would one day work. He designed central-heating systems, a solar boiler, a machine gun, a gas-lighting system. Most of these inventions, like so many of Leonardo’s three centuries earlier, were impracticable given the technology of Evans’s day. They were just the fancies of an endlessly fertile engineering imagination.

But Oliver Evans also made two singularly practical contributions to the technology of his times. The high-pressure steam engine he invented (his contemporary Richard Trevithick of England also invented one independently) would be the driving force of the nineteenth-century economy. And his automatic flour mill foreshadowed the industrial process by which Henry Ford would transform the world in the twentieth century. Together they give him a claim to the title of founding father of the American industrial revolution that few can match.

Oliver Evans was born near Newport, Delaware, in 1755, the fifth child in what would grow to be a family of twelve. His father was a farmer of modest prosperity, and at sixteen Oliver was apprenticed to a wheelwright and wagonmaker in Newport.


While learning the trade, Evans also read widely, especially in mathematics and mechanics. Only two years before, in 1769, James Watt had patented his first steam engine, four times as fuel-efficient as earlier ones, and the young Evans devoured the details of the new energy source. He would be deeply concerned with steam engines for the rest of his life.

But there was no market for steam engines in late colonial America, and in 1783 he joined with two of his brothers in building a flour mill on land they had bought from their father.

The technology of flour mills had not changed in any essential aspect since waterpower had first been utilized hundreds of years earlier. To make flour, sacks of grain were carried, one by one, up to the top of the mill, where they were poured into a device that separated the grain from dirt and chaff. Next the wheat dropped through a chute to a lower floor, where it was ground into meal by millstones.

The meal then dropped into a chest on the ground floor and was shoveled into buckets to be hoisted back up to the third floor, where it was spread out to cool. The meal was then pushed into a chute from which it fell into the bolting cylinder, a device that separated it into flour, middlings, and bran. Finally the flour was packed into barrels and was ready to ship.

The only parts of this complicated process that were powered by the water wheel were the actual grinding and bolting. Everything else was accomplished by human muscle. Evans immediately thought he saw a better way. Over the next few years he designed a series of bucket elevators and screw conveyors, powered by the water wheel, that moved the grain, meal, and flour from one process to another automatically. He also designed a “hopper boy” that spread and cooled the freshly ground meal and slowly pushed it into the boiler. It, too, was powered by the water wheel.

Except for the hopper boy, none of Evans’s devices were entirely new. The bucket elevator was an adaptation of the chain pump, known since Roman times, and the screw conveyor was merely a horizontal version of the Archimedes’ screw, a device so ancient it might even antedate Archimedes himself.

What was stunningly new was the conception of an integrated, automatic, industrial process. Automatic machinery, which worked without human operators, had been around for some time (the clock was perhaps the first). In the late eighteenth century the number of automatic machines grew swiftly. Textile and nail-making machines were developed among others. And, of course, there was Watt’s steam engine.

But until Oliver Evans no one had conceived of the factory itself as a machine. Yet Evans’s flour mill was exactly that: you poured grain in one end, and flour came out the other.

Having invented a better mousetrap, Evans expected the world to beat a path to his door. He was very disappointed. Flour mills already in operation were profitable as they were, and their owners saw no reason to install expensive machinery. Also, most of them were family enterprises, and the owners feared they might put their own relatives out of work.