in America was the same Oliver
Evans, a truly great inventor for whom the world was not quite ready.
The world has forgotten him. But he was the first engine builder in
America, and one of the best of his day. He gave to his countrymen the
high-pressure steam engine and new machinery for manufacturing flour
that was not superseded for a hundred years.

* Coleman Sellers, "Oliver Evans and His Inventions,"
"Journal of the Franklin Institute", July, 1886: vol. CXXII,
p. 16.

"Evans was apprenticed at the age of fourteen to a wheelwright. He was a
thoughtful, studious boy, who devoured eagerly the few books to which
he had access, even by the light of a fire of shavings, when denied
a candle by his parsimonious master. He says that in 1779, when only
seventeen years old, he began to contrive some method of propelling land
carriages by other means than animal power; and that he thought of a
variety of devices, such as using the force of the wind and treadles
worked by men; but as they were evidently inadequate, was about to give
up the problem as unsolvable for want of a suitable source of power,
when he heard that some neighboring blacksmith's boys had stopped up the
touch-hole of a gun barrel, put in some water, rammed down a tight wad,
and, putting the breech into the smith's fire, the gun had discharged
itself with a report like that of gunpowder. This immediately suggested
to his fertile mind a new source of power, and he labored long to
apply it, but without success, until there fell into his hands a book
describing the old atmospheric steam engine of Newcomen, and he was at
once struck with the fact that steam was only used to produce a vacuum
while to him it seemed clear that the elastic power of the steam if
applied directly to moving the piston, would be far more efficient.
He soon satisfied himself that he could make steam wagons, but could
convince no one else of this possibility."*

* Coleman Sellers, "Oliver Evans and His Inventions,"
"Journal of the Franklin Institute", July, 1886: vol. CXXII,
p. 3.

Evans was then living in Delaware, where he was born, and where he later
worked out his inventions in flour-milling machinery and invented and
put into service the high-pressure steam engine. He appears to have
moved to Philadelphia about 1790, the year of Franklin's death and of
the Federal Patent Act; and, as we have seen, the third patent issued
by the Government at Phil