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 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
Norbert Rillieux
Norbert Rillieux () was the inventor of the multiple-effect vacuum evaporator, which revolutionized the processing of sugar. He gained recognition as one of the prime architects of the modern sugar industry. Techniques developed by Rillieux are now commonly used in the reduction or concentration of saturated liquids into super-saturated liquids, high density solids, or dry granules.
Rillieux's invention has been adopted for the production of any number of solids and reduced liquids whose products are sensitive to heat. The manufacture of such commodities as condensed milk, soaps, gelatins and glues, the recovery of waste liquids in distilleries and paper-making factories, and the processing and production of petrochemicals all have used Rillieux's basic invention, or devices that are based on his process.
Early Years and Education
Norbert Rillieux was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on March 17, His parents were Vincent Rillieux, a white man, and Constance Vivant, a freed black slave. Vincent Rillieux was a successful engineer and inventor, who recognized the talent of his son at an early age and sent him to Paris for his education.
By , Rillieux was an
Norbert Rillieux was a brilliant student of thermodynamics who became famous for devising evaporators for sugar cane, revolutionizing the sugar-refining industry and easing the labor of slaves.
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 his slave wife, Constance Vivant, Norbert Rillieux was baptized at the St. Louis Cathedral in the Latin Quarter. Norbert was the oldest of seven children. As a Creole, Norbert had access to education and privileges not available to lower-status blacks or slaves. He was educated at Catholic Schools, then at L'Ecole Centrale in Paris.
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 the problem of evaporating moisture from cane juice while lowering heat to produce a whiter, more refined, sugar crystal.
Refining sugar had been a labor-intensive process, involving the handling of boiling hot liquids. The slaves on the plantations performed most of this labor
Norbert Rillieux
Norbert Rillieux revolutionized the sugar industry by inventing a refining process, evaporation in multiple effect, that is still in use today not only for the production of sugar, but also of soap, gelatin, condensed milk, and glue, as well as for the recovery of waste liquids in factories and distilleries.
Rillieux's system, in which a series of vacuum pans heat one another in sequence, had immediate impacts. 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.S. into a leading role in global sugar production and helped transform sugar from a luxury item to a commonplace one.
Norbert Rillieux was born in New Orleans, the son of a white engineer and a freed slave. He studied applied mechanics at the Ecole Centrale in Paris, but returned to New Orleans in the s. As the status of free blacks deteriorated in the South, he went back to Paris, where he lived until his death. In , the American Chemical Society de
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