Oliver Evans

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(b Llandaff, nr Cardiff, 13 March 1910; d London, 31 Oct 1973). Welsh painter and printmaker. Although born in Wales, he grew up in Glasgow. He first produced abstract paintings in 1930 while a pupil at Glasgow School of Art (1927-31), in part after scientific drawing, and, despite discouragement, continued to do so secretly at the Royal College of Art (1932-4), inspired by visits to Paris. He was a peripheral member of the Surrealist group in London and showed three paintings at the International Surrealist Exhibition (1936), although his work had Cubist elements. In 1938 he moved to South Africa to teach at the Natal Technical College in Durban, where he lived until he became an engineer with the South African army in North Africa and Italy (1942-5). He then began to paint anti-war subjects, depicting violent allegories of World War II in a style that was an idiosyncratic development of Vorticism. In part abstract, and in lurid colours, these were sometimes based on specific incidents, for instance The Chess Players (1940; Eldred Evans priv. col., see 1985 exh. cat., p. 36), which takes as its subject the non-aggression pact between Germany and Russia signed in August 1939. Others were about aggression in general, as in The Conflict (1940; M. O. Evans estate, see 1956 exh. cat., pl. IV). After the war he returned to London and held his first large exhibition at the Leicester Galleries in February 1949.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Oliver Evans (1755-1819) was one of America's first and most important inventors. He made major contributions to the technology of flour milling and steam engines.

Oliver Evans was born near Newport, Del. He was apprenticed to a wagon maker. About the age of 21 he began work on his first important invention: a machine to make the cards with which wool was brushed preparatory to spinning. In 1780 he married and joined his brothers in a flour milling business near Wilmington, Del., the center of that industry. Within 5 years he had made spectacular improvements in the ancient design of flour mills; these remained standard for a century.

Previously flour mills had required an enormous amount of difficult hand labor, and the flour was often dirty as a result. By harnessing the energy of the water-wheel to move the grain and flour both horizontally and vertically through the mill, Evans reduced the hand labor and improved the product's cleanliness. Although he patented his improvements, he had great difficulty in enforcing his legal rights to the invention. Soon after making these improvements, he moved to Philadelphia and established a manufactory of mill equipment.

Evans then turned to a problem which had long interested him: the production and harnessing of steam power. James Watt's low-pressure engine had been introduced into America by 1802, when Evans began to operate his first high-pressure engine. In the Watt engine, steam was condensed in the cylinder, creating a vacuum so that atmospheric pressure pushed the piston down. In Evans's new engine (which was independently invented in England at the same time) the steam was introduced into the cylinder under high pressure and used to push the piston down directly. In 1804 Evans built a steam-powered amphibious vehicle, but his hopes to introduce steam vehicles on common roads were not realized. However, his high-pressure engines soon became standard for American mills, railroads, and steamboats.

By the time Evans died in 1819, his large iron foundries in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh were turning out quantities of steam engines, mill equipment, and other types of ironwork. His two books, The Young Mill-Wright and Miller's Guide (1795) and The Abortion of the Young Steam Engineer's Guide (1805), were America's earliest handbooks on those subjects.

Further Reading

The only full-length biography of Evans is Greville and Dorothy Bathe, Oliver Evans: A Chronicle of Early American Engineering (1935). The story of steam engineering in America during Evans's time is told by Carroll W. Pursell, Jr., Early Stationary Steam Engines in America: A Study in the Migration of a Technology (1969). An old but still useful book on flour milling is Charles Byron Kuhlmann, The Development of the Flour-Milling Industry in the United States (1929).

Additional Sources

Ferguson, Eugene S., Oliver Evans, inventive genius of the American Industrial Revolution, Greenville, Del.: Hagley Museum, 1980.

Oliver Evans
Born	13 September 1755(1755-09-13) Newport, Delaware
Died	15 April 1819 (aged 63) New York, New York

Oliver Evans (13 September 1755 – 15 April 1819) was an American inventor. Evans was born in Newport, Delaware to a family of Welsh settlers. At the age of 14 he was apprenticed to a wheelwright.

Evans' first invention was in 1777, when he designed a machine for making card teeth for carding wool. He went into business with his brothers and produced a number of improvements in the textile industry. His most important invention was an automated grist mill which operated continuously through the use of bulk material handling devices including bucket elevators, conveyor belts, and Archimedean screws. Evans described this invention in The Young Mill-wright and Millers' Guide. He patented this invention in a few states and, when the US patent system was established, in the federal patent system. Evans devoted a great deal of his time to patents, patent extensions, and enforcement of his patents.^[1]

In 1792 he moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

He produced an improved high-pressure steam engine — his second most important invention. For some years he contemplated the idea of applying steam power to wagons. He was granted a patent for a steam-carriage design in 1789, but did not produce a working example of such a machine until over a decade later. (See below on his Oruktor Amphibolos). Part of his difficulties was a failure to get financial backing. After lack of support in his native land, in 1794 he sent copies of some his designs to Great Britain in an attempt to interest investors there.

As Evans designed a refrigeration machine which ran on vapor in 1805, he is often called the inventor of the refrigerator, although he never built one. (His design was modified by Jacob Perkins, who obtained the first patent for a refrigerating machine in 1834).

Contents 1 The Oruktor Amphibolos 2 Death 3 Tributes 4 References 5 External links

The Oruktor Amphibolos

The Oruktor Amphibolos, as illustrated in "The Boston mechanic and journal of the useful arts and sciences" (July, 1834)

The device for which Oliver Evans is best-known today is his Oruktor Amphibolos, or "Amphibious Digger", built on commission from the Philadelphia Board of Health. The Board was concerned with the problem of dredging and cleaning the city's dockyards, and in 1805 Evans convinced them to contract with him for a steam-powered dredge.

No technical drawings of the device survive, and the only evidence for its design come from Oliver Evans' own descriptions, which are contradictory, and most likely exaggerated. He describes the vehicle as a 30-foot (9.1 m) long 15 ton scow, powered by a 5 horse-power steam engine. For a demonstration of his long-held beliefs in the possibility of land steam demonstration, Evans mounted the hull on 4 wheels and may have connected the engine to them, to drive it through Philadelphia streets on the way to the river. The small size of the engine, the large size of the vehicle, and the lack of any contemporary evidence other than Evans' own writings for it make this seem unlikely. Evans claimed that his dredge was the first self-powered amphibious vehicle, as well as the first self-powered land vehicle in the United States (steam powered road vehicles had already been used earlier in France and Great Britain). The Oruktor Amphibolos was never a success as a dredge, and after a few years of sitting at the dock was sold for parts.

Subsequently, Evans wrote about the Oruktor in many publications, and each time the achievements became more impressive. He also 'corrected' the date of the machine from 1805 to 1804, possibly in a dispute about steamboat patents, and this inaccuracy has since been perpetuated by several commentators.^[2]

Oliver Evans wrote up proposals to mechanize road vehicles, but failed to get backing from investors, who saw the scheme as impractical. In 1812 he published a visionary description of the nation connected by a network of railroad lines with transportation by swift steam locomotives. It should be remembered that at the time the locomotive was little more than a crude curiosity, and no attempts to use it for long distance transport had yet been made; see: History of rail transport.

Death

In 1819, while in New York City, Oliver Evans was informed that his workshop in Philadelphia had burned to the ground. Evans suffered from a stroke at the news, and died soon after. He is buried in Trinity Cemetery, Broadway at 154th Street, New York City.^[3]

Tributes

In World War II the United States liberty ship SS Oliver Evans was named in his honor.

References

1. ^ Ferguson, Eugene S. (1980). Oliver Evans: Inventive genius of the American industrial revolution. Greenville, Delaware: The Hagley Museum. 
2. ^ Lubar, Steve. "Was This America’s First Steamboat, Locomotive, and Car?". Invention and Technology Magazine, Spring 2006, Volume 21, Issue 4. (at American Heritage.com). http://www.americanheritage.com/articles/magazine/it/2006/4/2006_4_16.shtml. Retrieved 2008-04-09. 
3. ^ Oliver Evans burial sites "April 15, 1819: Oliver Evans, Delaware inventor, died in New York and was buried at Zion Episcopal Church near the Bowery on lower Manhattan. His remains later were re-interred in an unmarked grave in Trinity Cemetery, Broadway at 157th Street in 1890." Accessed on May 11, 2008.

• Bathe, Greville and Dorothy Bathe (1935), Oliver Evans: a chronicle of early American engineering, Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Oliver Evans

• Oliver Evans on inventors.about.com
• Evans on invent.org
• "Who made America?"
• Mural showing Evans' "Steam Powered Amphibious Boat – 1804" (sic) on aoc.gov
• Invention & Technology Magazine: "Was This America’s First Steamboat, Locomotive, and Car?" – comprehensive examination of the Oruktor story, and how Evans embellished it over the years, including technical analysis about whether it could ever have worked
• Concise biography of Oliver Evans

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