Oliver Evans, (born Sept. 13, 1755, close to Newport, Del. [U.S.]—died April 15, 1819, New York, N.Y.), American inventor who pioneered the high-pressure steam engine (U.S. patent, 1790) and created the primary steady manufacturing line (1784).
Evans was apprenticed to a wheelwright on the age of 16. Observing the trick of a blacksmith’s boy who used the propellant drive of steam in a gun, he started to research methods to harness steam for propulsion. Before he might efficiently pursue this line of analysis, nevertheless, he grew to become concerned with numerous different industrial issues. Carding, or combing, fibres to arrange them for spinning was a laborious course of constituting a bottleneck within the newly mechanized manufacturing of textiles. To velocity this operation Evans invented a machine that lower and mounted 1,000 wire enamel per minute on leather-based, the enamel serving as an improved carding gadget.
In 1784, on the age of 29, he attacked one other main industrial manufacturing drawback, the age-old strategy of grinding grain. Building a manufacturing unit exterior Philadelphia and adapting 5 machines, together with conveyors, elevators, and weighing scales, he created a manufacturing line wherein all motion all through the mill was computerized. Labour was required solely to set the mill in movement; energy was equipped by waterwheels, and grain was fed in at one finish, handed by a system of conveyors and chutes via the levels of milling and refining, and emerged on the different finish as completed flour. The system, which lowered prices by 50 % in response to Evans’ calculations, a lot later was broadly copied in American flour milling.
When Evans utilized for patent safety, first to state governments (1787) and later to the brand new U.S. Patent Office (1790), he added a 3rd invention, his high-pressure steam engine. He continued to work on this for the subsequent a number of years, envisioning each a stationary engine for industrial functions and an engine for land and water transport. In 1801 he inbuilt Philadelphia a stationary engine that turned a rotary crusher to supply pulverized limestone for agricultural functions. The engine that grew to become related together with his title was an unique adaptation of the present steam engine; Evans positioned each the cylinder and the crankshaft on the identical finish of the beam as a substitute of at reverse ends, as had been accomplished beforehand. This enormously lowered the load of the beam. An ingenious linkage, which grew to become world well-known because the Evans straight-line linkage, made the brand new association possible. He noticed without delay the potential of such an engine for street transportation however was unable to influence the authorities to allow its use on the Pennsylvania Turnpike—not unnaturally, since it'd effectively have frightened the horses, which at the moment offered the primary type of transport. Within just a few years he had engines doing a number of other forms of labor, together with sowing grain, driving sawmills and boring machines, and powering a dredge to clear the Philadelphia water frontage. Completed by June 1805, his new kind of steam-engine scow, referred to as the Orukter Amphibolos, or Amphibious Digger, was 30 toes (9 m) lengthy by 12 toes (3.7 m) huge. In its equipment it embodied the chain-of-buckets precept of his computerized flour mill. Equipped with wheels, it ran on land in addition to on water, making it the primary powered street automobile to function within the United States.
In 1806 Evans started to develop his famous Mars Iron Works, the place, over the subsequent 10 years, he made greater than 100 steam engines that had been used with screw presses for processing cotton, tobacco, and paper. The Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., purchased one among Evans’ engines, and, when the War of 1812 broke out, Evans and a companion proposed to construct a strong steam warship with a big gun on the bow, thus anticipating John Ericsson’s Monitor of fifty years later; however the proposal was not accepted.
Evans’ final nice work, accomplished in 1817, was a 24-horsepower high-pressure engine for a waterworks. He died shortly after a disastrous fireplace that destroyed his Mars Iron Works, together with his priceless patterns and molds.
His Young Mill-Wright and Miller’s Guide, which he had written in 1792, continued to promote and had gone via 15 editions by 1860. In one other work, The Abortion of the Young Steam Engineer’s Guide (1805), he forecast the necessity for presidency subsidization of technological advances.
Vested pursuits in horses, in addition to poor roads, steep gradients, insufficient springing, and an insufficient expertise of supplies, hindered the adoption of his concepts for steam engines on roads. Also, as a result of later producers had been sluggish to utilize his modern manufacturing methods, Evans was lengthy a considerably uncared for determine. More lately, nevertheless, within the allocation of priorities for the event of the high-pressure steam engine, the simultaneity of Evans’ work with that of the British genius Richard Trevithick has been established, and historians have accorded correct credit score for his pioneering of the meeting line.