Norbert RILLIEUX was born on March 17, 1806, in New Orleans, Louisiana, to a French father ( planter and inventor) and a slave mother.
Norbert RILLIEUX revolutionized the sugar industry by inventing a refining process that reduced time, cost and bodily risk when producing sugar from cane and vegetable beet.
In 1830, Norbert RILLIEUX was at the Ecole central de Paris (France) where he studied evaporation engineering. He became also a professor there.
Norbert returned to New Orleans. He considered the methods of refining cane and beet sugar to be dangerous and rudimentary and also requiring too much manual labor and hard work.
These methods threatened the lives of the slaves who had to deal with the transfer of boiling cane juice, from one hot kettle to another, to obtain brown sugar.
Norbert RILLIEUX conceived, then, a kind of evaporating vessel, in which was included a series of condensation rings under empty chambers of all air; this evaporator was issued under US Patent No. 4,879.
The evaporator of Norbert Rillieux was patented in 1846. The invention of Norbert RILLIEUX was later used by mills in Cuba and Mexico. His technique removed much of the manual labor from the old refining process and saved the fuel.
Because, then, the juice boiled at very low temperatures, and the new technique made, ultimately, a superior product.
The process of Norbert RILLIEUX was very widely used in the plantations of Louisiana, Mexico as well as those of the rest of America.
It increased sugar production and reduced costs for planters.
Charles Brown, a chemist from the US Department of Agriculture, wrote that RILLIEUX’s invention (the evaporator tank) was the most important in the history of American industrial chemistry (Sammons).
Norbert RILLIEUX, in the face of racial harassment, left Louisiana for France in 1854, where he ended his life; He died in Paris in 1894. His tomb can be visited at Père Lachaise cemetery where he is buried.