From a Sugar Bowl to the International Space Station: Norbert Rillieux, African-American Inventor
By Jean M. West

From the spoonful of sugar that "helps the medicine go down" to the recycling processes of the International Space Station, Norbert Rillieux's inventions have transformed the lives of people during his lifetime and for more than a century afterwards. This African-American genius was a Renaissance man who made contributions in Egyptology and the fight against yellow fever; but he achieved international renown as the inventor of the multiple-effect evaporator that revolutionized the sugar industry. Despite the wide adoption of the Rillieux apparatus and its adaptation for use in all forms of modern industrial evaporators (from making evaporated milk, glue, and soap to desalinizing sea water to recycling on the International Space Station), Rillieux was denied recognition for his achievements in his lifetime, in part due to racism and in part due to jealousy and resistance to change by the scientific community.

Norbert Rillieux was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, on March 17, 1807. His birth record in City Hall states he was a "quadroon libre, natural son of Vincent Rillieux and Constance Vivant." His father, Vincent Rillieux, was a well-to-do white plantation owner and cotton merchant. He also was an engineer who had invented a steam-operated cotton baling press used in cotton warehouses. His mother, Constance Vivant, was one of Vincent's African-American slaves; interracial marriage was illegal in Louisiana during this era, so his parents were not wedded. Norbert Rillieux was classified as a quadroon because he was more than half white. It is unknown whether his classification as libre (as a "free man of color") comes from his father specifically emancipating him or because his mother had been freed before he was born.

Norbert was a good student in New Orleans' Catholic school system, so Vincent Rillieux sent him to Paris in the 1820s to study at L'école Centrale. He excelled at physics, mechanics, engineering. Following his graduation, 24-year-old Norbert Rillieux became an instructor of applied mechanics at L'école Centrale. During his years in Paris, Rillieux became interested in latent heat (the boiling point of liquids) and, in 1830, published several papers on steam engines and steam economy. He also began to work on a practical application of his knowledge of thermodynamics to the refining of sugar.

Introduced in the 1700s from the French colony of St. Domingue (Haiti) to Louisiana, sugar cane was a leading cash crop by the early 1800s. Vincent Rillieux, like many Louisiana planters, operated a sugar processing and refining operation on his plantation. He, like all other sugar producers of the era, processed sugar using a method called the "Jamaica Train." Slaves boiled sugar cane in open kettles and strained cane and juice apart. Using long ladles to skim sugar juice, slaves would transfer the boiling hot syrup from one kettle to the next kettle, reducing the liquid content of the mixture successively. In the last kettle, the water would vaporize entirely, and sugar crystals would form. It was extremely dangerous work for slaves who carried the scalding juice from one kettle to another. It was also very expensive because large amounts of fuel had to be burned to heat the successive kettles. Further, because of sugar's sensitivity to heat and changing air pressure, product quality was inconsistent.

The Saccharine Evaporator, a steam-operated single-pan vacuum, was devised by British inventor Charles Edward Howard in 1812. The boiling point of sugar, the point when sugar cane or sugar beet juice turns into steam and sugar crystals, was lower in a vacuum, so Howard's "single-effect" process was much more energy efficient and cost effective than open kettles. The Howard system was improved by the Frenchman Degrand, who condensed vapors from the vacuum pan, evaporating juice more efficiently. This system was used in France and exported to Louisiana and Cuba in the 1830s.

However, sugar processing required multiple steps, and the single pan system could not use latent heat from vapor (steam). In Paris, Norbert Rillieux experimented with moving sugar cane juice through a series of three closed evaporating pans. He discovered that, not only could juice be heated more efficiently in the vacuum, but by sending the vapor from one pan to another through condensing coils, also in the vacuum chamber, the vapor from the juice heated in the first pan contained nearly all the latent heat of the original steam. It could be used to heat the juice in the second pan, which had a lower boiling point because of operating in a vacuum, and repeated in a third pan (or fourth, or more). Pressure in the system was reduced by pumps that created the partial vacuum in which the pans operated.

Norbert Rillieux's sugar experiments evidently came to the ears of Edmund Forstall in New Orleans. In 1833, concerned about complaints over the quality of Louisiana sugar, Forstall offered Rillieux the position of chief engineer at his Louisiana Sugar Refinery, which was under construction. Norbert returned from France to New Orleans; however, because of disagreements between his father and Forstall, Rillieux did not pursue the job. Instead, in 1834, Norbert Rillieux and two assistants built the first prototype of his multiple-effect evaporator on the plantation of Zenon Ramon. But, the death of a friend caused Rillieux to abandon testing the evaporator, which had functioned poorly. In the years that followed, Rillieux speculated in land and became wealthy only to lose his fortune in the Panic of 1837. He also continued experimenting with improvements to his evaporator design and searching for financial backers, including successful free men of color, but with no success. During this time Rillieux became a close associate of Judah P. Benjamin (millionaire, and future U.S. Senator from Louisiana and Confederate Secretary of War and Secretary of State.)

Finally, in 1843, with financial sponsorship by Judah Benjamin and Theodore Packwood and the use of the sugarhouse on Packwood's Myrtle Grove plantation, Rillieux was able to build and test his improved multiple-effect evaporator. The mechanism was manufactured in Philadelphia and installed in 1845. Unlike kettle-produced sugar that was dark and irregular, the evaporator produced, in the words of Judah Benjamin, "crystalline grain and snow whiteness ... equal to those of the best double-refined sugar of our northern refineries." Packwood and Benjamin won first and second prizes respectively in 1846 for the best quality sugar in Louisiana.

In addition to producing a superior product and wasting less sugar during processing, the evaporator was energy efficient and dramatically reduced the fuel costs of sugar processors. By reusing heat energy, Rillieux drastically reduced the amount of fuel necessary to crystallize the sugar. Using dried sugar cane stalks as fuel instead of expensive wood, operators could pay for the cost of the evaporator with a single year's profits. Because the entire system was enclosed and valves could be operated by a single operator, Rillieux also eliminated the danger to workers from scalding liquid being transferred from one open kettle to another.

Unfortunately, the system introduced new dangers to workers, including boiler explosions and debilitating heat in the sugarhouses. The increased profitability of sugar also meant that more sugar was planted, and more slaves performed the arduous work of cutting cane in the sugar fields.

The United States Patent Office issued patent 4,879 on December 10, 1846, to Norbert Rillieux for his "improvement in sugar-making." By 1849, 13 sugar factories in Louisiana had adopted the Rillieux system. From Louisiana, the Rillieux evaporator spread to Mexico, Cuba, and the sugar producing islands of the Caribbean.

Although P. Horsin-Deon, a French sugar technologist, reported that Rillieux was "the most sought-after engineer in Louisiana" and had acquired a large fortune, Rillieux was constrained by Louisiana's racial codes. While he might go to a plantation to install an evaporator, he could not be entertained or lodged in the homes of his white patrons. As the United States drew closer to civil war, restrictions on African Americans in Louisiana tightened, regardless of whether they were free or slave. By 1855, Rillieux, like all "free persons of color," needed to carry a pass to move around New Orleans.

New Orleans was devastated by yellow fever epidemics in the 1850s, so Rillieux devised a system to eliminate the disease. He asked the state legislature to fund his plan to drain the wetlands surrounding the city and to improve the city sewer system. However, Edmund Forstall, Vincent Rillieux's nemesis, had become a state legislator and opposed Rillieux's plan. Concerns about awarding so prominent a contract to a "free person of color" also disturbed the legislators, so the proposal was shelved. New Orleans continued to be wracked by yellow fever until Walter Reed established the relationship between the disease and mosquitoes, and white engineers submitted a plan--virtually the same as Rillieux's--that was finally adopted by the legislature.

Around the outbreak of the Civil War, Rillieux decided to return to France "exhausted and asking for nothing but rest," according to Horsin-Deon. There, he discovered that some European engineers had copied his evaporators imperfectly. Their resulting poor performance had made his name synonymous with shoddy machinery even though they did not carry his name or have his approval. Facing both European reluctance to adopt new technology and an uphill battle to salvage his reputation, Rillieux abandoned engineering. After receiving a scholarship, he worked for a decade with the Champollions, brother and nephew of the decoder of the Rosetta Stone, translating Egyptian hieroglyphics at the Bibliothèque Nationale.

However, Norbert Rillieux decided to give engineering one last try. Most European sugar was produced from sugar beets rather than sugar cane. In 1881, at the age of 75, he patented a new multistage evaporator system for sugar beets that halved the cost of processing them. When, ten years later, the French government refused to recognize the diffusion process that he perfected in a sugar cane factory in Egypt, and he abandoned engineering for a final time.

Norbert Rillieux was married to a French woman, Emily Cuckow. He died at the age of 87 on October 8, 1894, and was buried in a vault at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Fifty years after his death, Dutch researchers convinced the International Sugar Cane Technologists to fund a memorial to Norbert Rillieux. Their bronze plaque is mounted in the Louisiana State Museum, housed in the Cabildo in New Orleans' French Quarter. Charles A. Browne, the U.S. Department of Agriculture chemist who arranged for the memorial's placement, declared that the Rillieux evaporator was "the greatest invention in the history of American Chemical Engineering." In 2002, the American Chemical Society designated the Rillieux multiple-effect evaporator a National Historic Chemical Landmark. Norbert Rillieux's invention had not merely changed sugar-making from manual labor to a mechanized operation; it had fundamentally changed the theory, practice, and methods of his own industry as well as industries he could not even dream of when he devised his invention.

Jean West taught in Fairfax County Public Schools and served as an education specialist at the National Archives before becoming a social studies education consultant.

1. Norbert Rillieux was classified as a quadroon libre under Louisiana law at the time of his birth. How was race determined in Louisiana at this time? What other racial classifications were used? What rights did "free persons of color" possess that slaves lacked? What rights did white persons possess that "free persons of color" lacked?



2. In what ways did the invention of the Rillieux apparatus improve life for slaves working in sugar processing? In what ways did the invention of the Rillieux apparatus make life more difficult for slaves?



3. The U.S. Government issued Norbert Rillieux a patent for his invention. What section and clause of the U.S. Constitution provides for patents? What does an inventor have to provide to the U.S. patent office to receive a patent? Has it changed since Rillieux's time?



4. What obstacles did Norbert Rillieux face in Louisiana? How successful was he in overcoming them?



5. What obstacles did Norbert Rillieux face in France? How successful was he in overcoming them?



6. Norbert Rillieux might fairly be called a Renaissance man for the variety of his accomplishments in more than one discipline. In what other areas besides sugar production did he make a contribution?



7. What success and recognition did Rillieux receive during his lifetime? What success has he received since his death? What other scientists or inventors were heavily criticized in their lifetimes but are now recognized as outstanding? Why do you think this happens? Was Norbert Rillieux a man ahead of his time?



8. What other African-American inventors have transformed industries, society, or the quality of human life?