Europe has Leonardo da Vinci; North America has…Oliver Evans? Maybe so; I’ll explain. Oliver Evans was born September 13, 1755 in Delaware, which at the time was not a state but a colony, and mostly wilderness. He didn’t receive any formal education, but was taught the basics, probably at home. He was apprenticed to a wheelwright as a boy, and managed to build a flour mill that was completely automated. It was water powered, and probably looked like something we might call a Rube Goldberg contraption, but it actually worked. This was the first automated industrial process, years before “mass production” became a trend. And in any case Evans probably got little or no information about anybody else’s inventions.
He settled in Philadelphia, where he got interested in those new-fangled steam engines. He had some ideas of his own, though, and in 1801 built the first high-pressure steam engine in North America (by then it was the US). Richard Trevithick had built one the year before in England, but once again, Evans didn’t know about it. He fitted one of his engines into a wagon, and in effect built the first automobile in the Western Hemisphere. And it was amphibious! It was fairly crude, and nobody was interested in buying one, but once again, it actually worked. He called it the “Oruktor Amphibolos.” He did manage to convert it into a steam-powered dredge and sold it to the city of Philadelphia, though.
Just like da Vinci, Evans left loads of notes and designs for inventions he didn’t have the means to actually build. It was in the early 1800s, but he designed a refrigerator (when Jacob Perkins built one from Evans’ design years later, it worked), gas lighting for cities, a machine gun, a transmission for his steam-powered wagon (an odd idea, because steam engines don’t need transmissions like internal combustion engines do), and a thing that today is in a lot of home kitchens: a bread making machine. Not to mention his solar-powered boiler, a better process for salvaging sunken ships, something called a “quadruple-effect evaporator” and more.
He’s not a household name today, and wasn’t in his own time either. Although he did have backers, he was reportedly not a very pleasant fellow and nobody liked him. Over the years he’s said to have become pretty bitter about his work being ignored, which only alienated him further. He did have some people on his side — including Thomas Jefferson, who as President signed an actual law called An Act for the Relief of Oliver Evans. It renewed his patent on his flour mill, and enabled him to collect royalties for an additional 14 years. But that didn’t help his image either; the general public seemed to think he was hounding the poor millers in their towns just because they’d copied his design without permission, and started a fake news campaign claiming he hadn’t even invented it. One newspaper published this in 1802: “few if any [millers] are inclined to give pompous blockhead, Oliver Evans, the credit of inventing any of the useful contrivances in milling for which he now enjoys patents.”
But who knows; maybe da Vinci struck people as a pompous blockhead too.
