Oliver Evans
1755-1819

                                                      INNOVATOR
                                                  BY HAROLD EVANS


"There are thousands of ingenious Yankees who fiddled with tools and bits and
pieces of machinery who are forgotten but whose incremental practical
innovations were critical to American progress. And of all the innovators I have
looked at, the most classically underrated in my judgment is Oliver Evans (1755-
1819), a Delaware country boy who had almost no formal education and yet gave
us the following: the first automatic production line (long before Henry Ford was
born); the first wheeled self-propelled vehicle to move on an American road; the
first amphibious vehicle; and America’s first effective high-pressure steam
engine. Evans conceived of some 80 inventions, including the first refrigerator
that used vapor. But the high-pressure steam engine alone was a mighty power
in the advancement of America from a rural to an industrial society. Evans
designed and built a hundred engines and boilers for American workshops,
freeing them—and the young nation they were serving—from the necessity of
access to waterpower. Henry Shreve, the master of the Mississippi River, used
Evans’s principle for the Washington, the model for a generation of steamboats
that opened the West."

Harold Evans is the author of The American Century; his forthcoming book on
innovators, They Made America, will be a WGBH documentary series.

An excerpt from American Heritage Magazine
October 2003    Volume 54, Issue 5

The image below is from The Architech of the Capitol website
Allyn Cox
Oil on Canvas
1973-1974

In 1802 American inventor Oliver Evans developed a high-pressure steam
engine that produced more power and weighed less than earlier models. His
design made it practical to use steam power for land vehicles, such as trains,
or boats. The mural is set in 1804 and depicts the nation's first
steam-powered amphibious dredging scow, using one of Evans's engines,
entering the Schuylkill River.


Full text of the world's first fully automated production line.

Full text of the first high pressure steam engine and refrigarator.

                                         Articles About Evans

                                  American Heritage-Joseph Gies
                                               Fall 1990
                                               Spring 2006

                                                     PHMC
                                      

                           Society for Industrial Archeology Newsletter
                                       Spring Edition-2005

                                Oliver Evans Reference Works

                        Oliver Evans 200 Year Celebration in Philly

               Sir Harold Evans speaks about Who Made America

                       Journal of the Franklin Institute

                   Lecture delivered by Coleman Sellers, Jr.,1886.
  • Left: The steamboat on the Platte River symbolizes the breakthrough in
    water travel made possible by Evans's invention.
  • Right: The world's first railroad suspension bridge (designed by John
    Roebling, who would later create the Brooklyn Bridge), symbolizing steam-
    powered land travel, spans the Niagara River near Niagara Falls.
The Kline Mill builtin1794,with
machinery designed by Oliver
Evans in 1795
Photo: Brooklyn Bridge Baby's photostream