Who is robert rillieux

Born free on March 17, , on a New Orleans plantation to Vincent Rillieux,a prosperous engineer and inventor of a steam-operated cotton baler, and hisslave wife, Constance Vivant, Norbert was baptized at the St. Louis Cathedral in the Latin Quarter. In , Rillieux's skill in engineering brought him a teaching post in applied mechanics at his Paris alma mater. That same year he published his findings on the applicability of steam economy to industry, and began working on theproblem of evaporating moisture from cane juice while lowering heat to produce a whiter, more refined, sugar crystal.

At the same time that he evolved the basic machinery, he created lunettes, which are glass chambers through which the technician could observe the process, a catchall for preventing sugar from escaping from one pan to another, and cast-iron vessels to replace costlier copper containers. Ten years after beginning work, Rillieux tested his multi-effect vacuum evaporating chamber, a bulky locomotive-sized apparatus containing a network of condensing coils for evaporating raw cane juice.

A secondary advantage to the internal coils was the use of vapor from the first stage of the process as theheat source for the rest of the procedure. By removing intense human labor and increasing fuel economy, the device improved the product, increased the rate of production, and cut expenses and the cost of sugar. He patented the device in , but for two years he found no investor for his system.

After these successes, Rillieux managed to convince 13 Louisiana sugar factories to use his invention. They were able to select machines capable of making , , or pounds of sugar per day. The evaporators were so efficient that the sugar makers were able to cover the costs of the new machine with the huge profits from the sugar produced with Rillieux's system.

In the s, New Orleans was suffering from an outbreak of Yellow Fever, caused by disease carrying mosquitoes. Norbert Rillieux devised an elaborate plan for eliminating the outbreak by draining the swamplands surrounding the city and improving the existing sewer system, thus removing the breeding ground for the insects and therefore the ability for them to pass on the disease. Unfortunately, Edmund Forstall, Norbert's former partner was a member of the state legislature and spoke out against the plan.

Forstall was able to turn sentiment against Rillieux and the plan was rejected. Disgusted will the racism prevalent in the south as well as the frustration of local politics Rillieux eventually left New Orleans and moved back to France. Ironically, after a number of years of Yellow Fever outbreak, the state legislature was forced to implement an almost identical plan that was introduced by white engineers.

Norbert Rillieux returned to France in the late s. In , at the age of 75, Rillieux made one last foray into sugar evaporation when he adapted his multiple effect evaporation system to extract sugar from sugar beets. The process for which he filed patent was far more fuel-efficient than that currently in use in the beet sugar factories in France.

Prior to Rillieux's invention, two engineers developed a vacuum pan and electric coils to improve the process of making sugar, but this was unsuccessful due to the use of steam at wrong locations in the machine. Rillieux's process fixed the errors in the previous process, but Rillieux lost the rights to the patent he had filed. Norbert Rillieux died on October 8, at the age of His wife, Emily Cuckow, died in and is buried beside him. There is a well-documented trend of growth among black or African American female medical school graduates.

While most African Americans were part of the hardworking labor forces in agriculture and industry, a small percentage were hard at work creating inventions that helped transform America.

Google Plus. Read about the great African Americans who fought in wars. Read more. Thin jazz, think art, think of great actors and find them here. 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 He found him in a library, translating Egyptian hieroglyphics. Still, his technical interest revived once more. First, it replaced a dangerous, labor-intensive process known as the "Jamaican Train," in which slaves were required to transfer boiling cane juice from one cauldron to another.

The new process also produced a higher-quality product while using less fuel. These improvements in efficiency catapulted the U.