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manufacturing flour that was not superseded for a hundred years.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