Today, we bring high-tech to sugar cane. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Norbert Rillieux was born in
New Orleans in 1806. His mother was a former slave
who was, to best of our knowledge, freed before he
was born, and his father was white -- not an
uncommon situation in the highly mixed population
of New Orleans, two hundred years ago. Norbert was
very bright, so his father, an inventor himself,
sent him off to the Ecole Centrale in Paris where
he studied engineering. Norbert Rillieux stayed on
as an instructor for a few years, and he published
papers on steam power.
He also began working on a problem from back in
Louisiana. The last thing you do when you make
white sugar is to evaporate the water used in the
refining process. That exacts a terrible cost in
fuel. Norbert Rillieux put his thermodynamic
knowledge to work. He invented the first multistage
evaporator. By evaporating and condensing at
successively lower pressures, he used the heat over
and over. It was a brilliant idea.
But Rillieux was caught between two pernicious
forces -- racism in America and technological
conservatism in Europe. He weighed the alternatives
and went back to New Orleans to work on a
prototype. It was the right decision at the right
time. He patented the machine in 1846 and prospered
for some time. He was very highly thought of as a
process engineer, and his machine revolutionized
sugar refining. Finally, though, as the institution
of slavery strengthened before the Civil War, the
racial situation got worse. Rillieux returned to
France.
And there he ran into prejudice of a different
kind. Certain French engineers had misused his
process. They made it look ineffective, and that
hurt the good name he'd enjoyed as an engineer in
America. He finally walked away from process
engineering and took up archaeology. Author Robert
Hayden tells us that a leading American sugar
planter looked Rillieux up in Paris in 1880. He
found him in a library, translating Egyptian
hieroglyphics.
Still, his technical interest revived once more. At
the age of 75 he patented another process -- one
that cut in half the cost of processing sugar
beets. Yet, when he died in Paris in 1894, his
abiding disappointment was the French refusal to
credit his invention of multistage evaporation. In
the end, Europe finally did recognize it. In 1934,
the International Sugar Cane Technologists created
a memorial to this remarkable engineer.
Norbert Rillieux's life suffered from prejudice on
two sides; but he showed us a mind larger than the
troubles assailing it. And today, Rillieux's
evaporators are used for everything from desalting
sea water to recycling processes in the space
station.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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