Norbert Rillieux

Norbert Rillieux was born on the seventeenth of March 1806 at the family plantation of L'Hermitage at Kenner, Louisiana, the eldest natural child of Vincent Rillieux — a wealthy French Creole planter and engineer who designed the steam-cotton-press equipment used across the New Orleans cotton economy — and Constance Vivant, a free quadroon woman of the New Orleans gens de couleur libres whom Vincent had taken under the plaçage convention of pre-Civil War Louisiana. He was baptised as a free child of colour at the St Louis Cathedral on the eighth of June 1806 — the formal recognition by his father that would secure his freedom and his education.

He was sent at the age of fifteen to Paris for technical education at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, then the leading French engineering school. He was appointed an instructor of applied mechanics at the École Centrale at twenty-four and published in 1830 a sequence of papers in the Annales des Ponts et Chaussées on the thermodynamics of steam-engine compounding that established his reputation as one of the gifted thermodynamic engineers of his generation. He returned to Louisiana in 1834 and accepted a post as chief engineer of a sugar estate at the suggestion of his father.

In 1843 he received United States Patent 3,237 for the apparatus now known as the Rillieux multiple-effect evaporator. The device — a sequence of progressively lower-pressure vacuum chambers in which the latent heat of the steam from the first stage drives evaporation in the second, the steam from the second drives the third, and so on — reduced fuel consumption by a factor of three and eliminated the labour-intensive caramelisation of the open-kettle sugar-boiling method previously universal in Louisiana. By the early 1850s the Rillieux process had been installed in thirteen Louisiana plantations and had been licensed to refiners in Mexico and Cuba. The principle is the foundational technology of the modern sugar, paper, condensed milk, soap, glue and chemical-process industries.

He returned to Paris in the 1850s on grounds of the discriminatory racial-pass laws then being imposed on free Black engineers in Louisiana and was awarded a second French patent in 1881. He died at Paris on the eighth of October 1894, at eighty-eight, and is buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery.

He is honored here as the inventor of the multiple-effect evaporator.