Norbert Rillieux
1806 – 1894

Norbert Rillieux was born in New Orleans, Louisiana to Constance Vivant, a slave who had probably been freed before Norbert’s birth, and Vincent Rillieux, a White planter and engineer whose own inventions included a steam-powered cotton baling press.  The elder Rillieux had his son baptized in the cathedral in New Orleans and Norbert was given his father’s surname, although an actual marriage between Rillieux and Vivant would have been illegal at that time.  Rillieux, Sr. soon recognized his son’s intelligence and when Norbert was old enough, he sent the boy to France to receive an education.  As a young man in Paris, Norbert Rillieux published several papers on steam power and by the age of 24 was an instructor in applied mechanics at a French school.  

Sugar was a major crop and refinement of sugar a major industry in Louisiana, as it was in Mexico and Cuba.  A procedure called the “Jamaica Train” was used to process sugar; the Jamaica Train was labor-intensive, sloppy, dangerous, and time-consuming.  Slaves on sugar plantations would boil sugar cane juices in a series of open vats or kettles heated with copious amounts of fuel.  When the juice was condensed to a desired level, it was manually transferred to the other kettles with long-handled ladles.  

While teaching in France, Norbert Rillieux began to develop an application for his training that would benefit people back home.  An inventor named Howard had devised a single-effect process for sugar juice evaporation, but while it had been used in some European countries, it had not been widely adopted in the Americas because it did not make efficient use of the heat.  Because the boiling point for liquids is reduced along with atmospheric pressure, Rillieux surmised that sugar cane juice could be heated more efficiently in a vacuum; if multiple pans were connected in a way that would allow the juice to automatically transfer from one pan to another, then less heat would be lost and heat (latent steam and vapors) from the same source could be used to heat all the pans together.  To meet these criteria, Rillieux devised a multiple effect pan evaporator (see picture).  Only one person was needed to operate the valves, and there was no possibility of spillage with the completely enclosed apparatus.  

Rillieux returned to Louisiana in the mid-1830s to be the chief engineer of a sugar refinery being built by one Edmund Forstall.  Rillieux left this position after a short time, possibly because there was a history of bad feelings between his father and Forstall.  An early experiment using equipment constructed by Rillieux himself did not work well.  He then attempted to set up a couple of business deals which would have allowed him to test his invention, but he met with some obstacles, not least among them, prejudice toward him as an African American.  Finally in 1843 a planter named Theodore Packwood, who owned a plantation called Myrtle Grove, contacted Rillieux and asked him to have his multiple effect pan evaporator system manufactured by a company in Philadelphia.  Rillieux patented the invention in 1843, and in 1845 he installed and tested the equipment at Myrtle Grove with complete success.  It became the state of the art, and was much in demand throughout the sugar industry in the Americas.  The sugar produced by the Rillieux method was cleaner and of higher quality than any that had ever been available before. The process Rillieux designed is still used today for refining sugar, as well as for making condensed milk, glue, and other products requiring evaporation.  

In the years preceding the Civil War, conditions deteriorated for free Blacks, and with the onset of war, the sugar industry suffered a slump.  Norbert Rillieux returned to France in 1854.  He met with more obstacles to obtaining a European patent for his invention, and was disappointed by the lack of credit and recognition he received while French inventors attempted to copy his work.  He lost interest in mechanical engineering for some years and studied Egyptology instead, spending many years translating hieroglyphics.  When he was in his seventies, he had a resurgence of interest in sugar processing and patented a process that ended up cutting the cost of processing European sugar beets in half. 

Norbert Rillieux died in France at the age of eighty-eight. Little is known about his wife, who survived him, but she is thought to have been in comfortable financial circumstances until her death.  In 1934, representatives from the sugar industry around the world recognized Rillieux’s contribution by having a bronze commemorative plaque with his picture cast and placed in the Louisiana State Museum.  The plaque reads, “To Honor and Commemorate Norbert Rillieux, born at New Orleans, La., March 18 1806, and died at Paris, France October 8, 1894.  Inventor of Multiple Evaporation and its Application into the Sugar Industry.”    []