Communications on Communication

The New York Times did a special feature on the Centennial of the automobile in their Oct. 16, 1997 issue. I wrote them a letter pointing out they were 90 years too late, which they published on Oct. 23. I actually got four responses to my letter, one from the editor of Ninnau, a newspaper for Welsh-speaking North Americans, asking for a biography of Oliver Evans, the inventor of the first American automobile, who happened to be Welsh. I was happy to oblige, if only to show I could write about something other than telephones. The following appeared in the January 1, 1998 issue.

Oliver Evans, Inventor

1997 has been celebrated by many as the centennial of the automobile. However, this celebration is 92 years late. In 1805, Oliver Evans, an inventor of Welsh descent, drove his Orukter Amphibolos, the first self-propelled land vehicle in America, west from his shop at 9th and Market in Philadelphia to the Schuylkill River, parking it on the way for public display at the present location of City Hall (Broad and Market).

The Orukter Amphibolos (amphibious digger) was actually a steam-powered dredge weighing 17 tons, built for the city to deepen the Delaware River dock area. To deliver it from his shop to the working site, Evans equipped the Orukter with wheels driven by his most important invention, the high-pressure steam engine. The only convenient launching site was where Market Street crossed the Schuylkill; after launching, the Orukter floated clear of its wheels and the steam engine was connected to a paddle wheel. The Orukter then steamed down to where the Schuylkill joins the Delaware, and upstream for 14 miles against the current before turning around and returning to the Philadelphia docks.

Although Watt and Boulton had been selling their steam engine since 1776, and more primitive engines had been available from about 1700, all worked at low pressure and, as a result, had to be physically huge to generate enough power to do useful work. Evans ran his steam engine at about 100 pounds per square inch (above atmospheric pressure), allowing it to be small enough to be mounted on a 30x12 foot barge. He had wanted to build what we would call, today, a bus to carry passengers, but he was never able to obtain financing; building the dredge for the city at least allowed him to demonstrate what his engine could do.

Oliver Evans was born in Delaware in 1755, the son of Charles Evans, a "cordwainer," and Ann Stalcop, daughter of a miller. The Evans family was apparently among the Welsh settlers who came to Delaware with the English after the latter had seized it from the earlier Swedes, Finns and Dutch in 1664; the Stalcop family was of Dutch descent.

In 1771, the 16 year old Oliver was apprenticed to a wheelwright where he learned the practical mechanics and smithing required by the trades of that day. But he quickly learned something about the power of steam when his brother told him how the son of a local blacksmith had made a gun go off with a bang louder than gunpowder by putting in water, ramming down wadding, and inserting the closed end of the gun into the smith's fire. Later, Oliver identified this "experiment" as the time when he first visualized the use of steam to drive a carriage.

Evans came of age in 1776, and shortly thereafter started manufacturing iron wire. He quickly applied his wire to "carding" wool to prepare its fibers for spinning on the way to manufacturing textiles. He developed a machine that could cut and mount 1000 wire teeth per minute on leather, and almost at once found his carding invention put into practice (without payment) by a company in Philadelphia.

After the Revolution, Oliver and his brothers ran a village store in Maryland and bought a farm and mill. The mill, with its machinery (or lack thereof), inspired Oliver to make basic inventions for reducing labor and improving the quality of the flour produced. This basic design for an "automated" mill was eventually widely accepted and is now generally considered to be a pioneering effort toward a production line. In 1795, he published "The Young Mill-wright and Miller's Guide," a book describing his mill design, which went through 15 editions by 1860. Even so, he, like Eli Whitney, had difficulty collecting royalties for the right to use his inventions.

In 1792, Evans moved up the Delaware River to Philadelphia and went into business, presumably to manufacture milling machinery for which he had finally gotten a United States patent after the establishment of the national Patent Office the year before. He finally began to make money on licenses for milling equipment as well as selling milling supplies; this gave him time to start experiments on his high-pressure steam engine. By October 1, 1792, he had prepared a patent specification.

In 1793, a friend of his went to England to try to sell Evans' milling equipment, but found that England, with small wind-mills on each hill, was not a good market for the larger, more centralized mill that Evans had designed. In 1795, another friend took plans for his high pressure steam engine to England, and died there before he could establish a business relationship.

Richard Trevithick, an English engineer who had been working toward steam-powered trains and who was aware of Watt's objection to low-pressure steam engines for such use because of their size, apparently saw (or could have seen) Evans' plans for small, high-pressure engines. In 1802 he built a pumping station driven by a high pressure engine at 145 pounds per square inch, and in 1803 he used that engine in the first locomotive to do useful work. It was to run on a Welsh tramroad at Pen-y-Darren, but turned out to still be too heavy for the rails available at that time.

It took Evans a while to get enough money to build his own engine, but by the end of 1801, he had it working in his shop at 9th and Market, operating a rotary crusher to break limestone into small pieces for agricultural purposes and to make Plaster of Paris. He built a second engine to be used in a Mississippi river boat and shipped it to New Orleans by the end of 1802. Just before the boat could be tested, however, it was carried away by a spring flood. The engine was salvaged and used in a saw mill. The patent office finally issued the Evans high pressure steam engine patent on Feb. 14, 1804.

John Fitch, a friend of Evans, had been experimenting with steam boats since 1787, and for a time offered regular service on the Delaware River. Rumsey and others were carrying out similar experiments. Fulton and Stevens got the exclusive right to run steam boats on the Hudson and, in 1810, on the lower Mississippi. Because others, including his friend Fitch, had rights to the use of steam engines on water, Evans concentrated on land vehicles. Unfortunately, he was only able to demonstrate the possibilities with the Orukter in 1805.

This led him to other applications, and in 1806 he built his "Mars Iron Works" in Philadelphia to make steam engines to drive saw mills, flour mills, screw presses, cotton gins, etc. In 1810, a steam-driven flour mill, the first west of the Alleghenies, went into operation in Pittsburgh, combining Evans' basic ideas about flour mills and steam engines. By 1816, Evans had made over 100 steam engines. He also continued to sell milling equipment and supplies, with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson among his customers.

Railroads, first powered by oxen or horses like canal boats, came to America starting about 1810, but steam engines suitable for railroad use weren't available until about 1830. In the meantime, river boats forged ahead, although they demonstrated the actual dangers of high-pressure steam. There were many explosions, often with considerable loss of life. It took time to develop all the detailed improvements necessary to make high pressure steam engines safe for boats and trains. Practical application is a long way from the initial good idea.

Evans, like many inventors, fought a continuing battle to collect royalties on his patents. But he received a major blow in 1809 when a judge ruled that patents themselves infringe the rights of the public. He burned all his papers relating to his inventions so that neither he nor anyone in his family would be tempted to ignore the business which made their living (selling milling supplies) and go off on the thankless task of inventing something new. In 1836, another fire, this time in the Patent Office, destroyed more early records, including those of Evans, making it difficult for historians to fully appreciate his work.

The final blow came when 1819 when a disgruntled apprentice burned down the Mars Iron Works, destroying more of his plans, molds and other apparatus necessary for producing steam engines. Evans died in New York a few days later.

Historians, often more interested in war, politics, and economics than in technology and innovation, have not done well by Oliver Evans. However, in 1936, Grenville Bathe, an engineer with an interest in history, and his wife, Dorothy, wrote an excellent biography (reprinted in 1972 by the Arno Press), and the editors of Automotive Quarterly have expanded the story of the Orukter in The American Car Since 1775, published by E. P. Dutton & Co. Further, the current CD ROM edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica makes Evans and his Orukter, as well as a great deal of contemporary information, available with a mouse click. At last Oliver Evans is beginning to be appreciated for his ground-breaking work which has contributed so much to the making of America and the advancement of the world.

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