Norbert
Rillieux
NORBERT RILLIEUX isn't a name that even history literate
Africans in America readily identify with, but his contribution made the world a lot
sweeter, insofar as he invented a process that made sugar a common food staple, rather
than a luxury. Before the 1840's, sugar was an expensive extravagance for America's
gentry, due to the slow and inefficient process used to refine sugarcane. But in 1843,
thanks to Rillieux's multiple-effect pan evaporator, the sugar industry was changed
forever.
Rillieux was an inventor who was born in New Orleans to a slave mother and French
Plantation owner, in 1806. Vincent Rillieux, the plantation's owner was an engineer thus,
he not only freed Norbert's mother (Constance Vivian), but also educated their quadroon of
offspring and later sent him to Paris to study engineering at L'Ecole Centrale. In 1830,
Rillieux became the school's youngest-ever instructor when he was hired at age 24, by the
department of applied mechanics. Most of the details of Rillieux's student life in France
come from P. Horsin-Deon, a noted French sugar technologist and engineer and friend of the
Black inventor during the last half of the 19th century.
Evidently the young Rillieux showed rare aptitude for engineering since at age twenty-four
he was an instructor in applied mechanics at L'Ecole Centrale in Paris. In 1830 he
published a series of papers on steam engine work and steam economy. According to
Horsin-Deon, it was at this time he developed the theory of the multi-effect evaporator.
Unfortunately, none of Rillieux's original publications has survived, but according to
French sources, the work was well developed and of high quality. Horsin-Deon, who served
as Rilleux's secretary in France and later editor of the journal L'Accol et Suere, states
that Rillieux had the help of two friends in the Ramon plantation experiment in 1834.
He returned to Louisiana in 1840 to perfect his evaporator that used a partial vacuum to
lower the boiling point of can juice and recycle the resulting steam for more heat,
greatly increasing fuel efficiency and turning sugar into a household commodity.
Manufacturers of condensed milk, soap, glue and gelatin have also appropriated his device.
Few details of Rillieux's social status as a free man of color are known. In a story from
Horsin-Deon, Rillieux was housed in the slave quarters on some plantations that his work
required him to visit, but this was an exaggeration.
Direct evidence from a man whose father knew Rillieux and employed him on his plantation
as an engineer indicates that the color problem was met by providing a special house with
slave servants for the inventor on his visits as a consultant. According to Horsin-Deon,
he was "the most sought after engineer in Louisiana," but because of his Colored
blood he could not be entertained at the owner's house or in the home of any White person.
Rillieux's own reminiscences, as transcribed through Horsin-Deon, do not refer to
injustices because of his color, but there can be no doubt that he was subjected to
restriction and possibly indignities.
Free people of color were increasingly more restrained with the approach of the Civil War,
although they never reached the status of slaves. Another prerogatives free people of
color included: Property rights; own slaves (some free people of color owned slaves), and
subject to taxation (although they were deprived of the use of New Orleans public school
system). For 13 years (1841-1854) in America, Rillieux "had to battle against
prejudices of all kinds before being able to erect, even at his own cost, his first triple
effect on a sugar plantation in Louisiana."
By 1855 a free person of color could not move about the streets of New Orleans without
permission, nor might he stop in the city without first presenting a guarantee of some
White man. Failure to leave the city when ordered meant years of imprisonment at hard
labor. These restrictions probably contributed toward Rillieux's decision to return to
France to live, although another argument for such a move would have been the rapid
decline of the sugar industry in Louisiana during the war. Norbert Rillieux was living in
Paris by 1861.
Ironically, Rillieux had lost all interest in sugar machinery and took up the study of
Egyptology, He worked for at least a decade with the Champollions, who were noted
specialists on Egypt and hieroglyphics. In 1894, Duncan Keener (one of the leading sugar
planters of Rillieux's day in Louisiana), on a trip to Paris in 1880 visited the inventor.
Keener was surprised to find Rillieux assiduously deciphering hieroglyphics at the
Bibliotheque Nationale. When Rillieux was nearing 75 (1881) he returned from the pyramids
and returned his attentions to the problems of evaporation and sugar machinery.
In 1881 he patented a system for heating juice with vapors in multiple effect, which is
now universal practice in cane and beet sugar factories. This innovation, which Rillieux
made at such an advanced age, was credited with reducing fuel consumption in French beet
sugar houses to one-half that before its introduction. In collaboration with Horsin-Deon,
Jr. a cane sugarhouse was constructed in Egypt on the Rillieux system, using a
quintuple-effect vapor vacuum pan for boiling sugar to grain, and a triple-effect for
juice and other heating. The Egyptian factory employed the diffusion process, which gives
very thin juices, and there fuel economies were of great importance.
Many sugar engineers of today do not realize that such an extensive use of steam in
multiple effects was fully developed over 60 years ago. This combined process of juice
heating; vapor boiling to grain, and multiple-effect evaporation seems to be the French
process patent, which Rillieux lost because "experts were unwilling to recognize his
invention." The loss of his process greatly wounded Rillieux's spirit and he died--
more from a broken heart than from the weight of his 89 years-- in 1894.
(Feature suggested by Senior Analysis Sgt. Damon Brody, an African-American
News&Issues Black History researcher, stationed at Schofield Military Base in Germany.
Brody, is a Jones H. S. graduate.ar. |
