Rillieux, Norbert

Source:

 African American National Biography

Rillieux, Norbert

(17 Mar. 1806-8 Oct. 1894),

inventor, chemical engineer, was born in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Vincent Rillieux Jr., an engineer, and Constance Vivant, who belonged to a wealthy free black family of landowners and landlords. Vincent Rillieux Jr., a businessman and inventor of a steam-operated press for baling cotton, was white, but Norbert and his mother belonged to the mainly Francophone and Catholic ethnic group of free people of color (often referred to as “Black Creoles” after the Civil War). Little is known of Norbert Rillieux's childhood from the time of his baptism in the St. Louis Cathedral of New Orleans to the time he and his brother Edmond were sent, like many other young freemen of color, to France to be educated. By 1830 Rillieux was an instructor in applied mechanics at the École Centrale in Paris and is reported to have published several papers on steam power.

The following year, in 1831, Norbert Rillieux made an extraordinary discovery that prompted his return to New Orleans and would eventually transform the sugar-refining process in Louisiana and throughout the world. The traditional manner of reducing sugarcane juice for sugar production, called the Jamaica Train, required the tedious and backbreaking labor of numerous slaves who, armed with long ladles, skimmed the boiling sugar juice from one open kettle to the next. Rillieux developed an ingenious apparatus, employing condensing coils that used the vapor from one vacuum chamber to evaporate the juice from a second chamber. The new invention—safer, more efficient, and less expensive than the open-kettle system—has been described as having been as significant for the sugar industry as Eli Whitney's cotton gin was for the processing of cotton.

Rillieux failed to interest French planters in his invention, but in 1833 he was invited back to New Orleans by the planter and banker Edmund Forstall to be chief engineer of a new sugar refinery. The appointment did not materialize, but Rillieux continued to perfect his apparatus and also made a fortune in land speculation, which he lost in the nationwide financial collapse of 1837. Some elegant architectural drawings that he produced with his brother Edmond during this period survive in the Notarial Archives in New Orleans. In 1843 two prominent planters hired Rillieux to install evaporators, Theodore Packwood at his plantation later known as Myrtle Grove, and Judah P. Benjamin at his Bellechasse plantation. Within three years Packwood won first prize and Benjamin and Packwood second prize for best sugar, the awards mentioning use of Rillieux's patent sugar-boiling apparatus. On 26 August 1843 Norbert Rillieux was awarded his first patent from the U.S. Patent Office for a double-effect evaporator in vacuum, followed by a patent in 1846 for a triple-effect evaporator with horizontal tubular heating surface. Approval for a later patent (1857) was at first denied on the erroneous assumption that Rillieux was a slave and therefore not a U.S. citizen. “Now, I was the applicant for the patent and not the slave. I am a Citizen of the United States and made oath of the fact in my affidavit,” Rillieux wrote.

Judah Benjamin, the brilliant Jewish jurist who later served as Jefferson Davis's secretary of state for the Confederacy, became Rillieux's major supporter in Louisiana sugar circles. He publicized Rillieux's apparatus in a series of articles in J. D. B. De Bow's popular commercial magazine (which came to be known as De Bow's Review). In 1846 Benjamin described the sugar produced by Rillieux's method as the best in Louisiana, its “crystalline grain and snowy whiteness … equal to those of the best double-refined sugar of our northern refineries.” For ten years at least, Rillieux was a conspicuous figure in New Orleans manufacturing. Benjamin's earliest biographer, Pierce Butler, reported that “frequently, for quite long visits, came the dried-up little chemist Rillieux, always the centre of an admiring and interested group of planters from the neighborhood as he explained this or that point in the chemistry of sugar or the working of his apparatus.” Rillieux was described by one contemporary as “the most sought-after engineer in Louisiana,” but he was still, by Louisiana law, a person of color, suffering under increasing legal and social restrictions as North-South tensions escalated.

It is not known exactly when Rillieux returned to France. He had many reasons, including the new restrictions imposed in 1855 on free people of color in New Orleans. Apparently Rillieux returned to France just before or during the Civil War and remained there until his death. There is no evidence that he knew his most famous relative, the Impressionist Parisian painter Edgar Degas, whose mother was Rillieux's first cousin. (This family connection was recently announced by Christopher Benfey in “Degas and the ‘Black World’: Art and Miscegenation in New Orleans,” New Republic 21 [Oct. 1996].) Late in life Rillieux became interested in Egypt, and in 1880 he was found deciphering hieroglyphics in the Bibliothèque Nationale by the Louisiana planter Duncan Kenner. During his seventies he was still working on refinements to various devices for beet and cane sugar production. Norbert Rillieux was buried in Paris's Père Lachaise cemetery, survived by his wife, Emily Cuckow Rillieux, who lived in comfortable circumstances for another eighteen years.

This entry is taken from the American National Biography and is published here with the permission of the American Council of Learned Societies.

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