Rillieux, Norbert

Norbert Rillieux was born on March 17, 1806, to a wealthy white man and his longtime mistress. Norbert s father, Vincent Rillieux, was a cotton merchant and engineer. His mother, Constance Vivant, was a free African American from a rich real estate family in New Orleans she herself was the daughter of a white father and a black mother. 

Vincent Rillieux freely acknowledged his family. Norbert was baptized by a Roman Catholic priest in St. Louis Cathedral, where blacks and whites knelt side by side to pray. The child s birth was registered in City Hall in a mixture of French and English as Norbert Rillieux, quadroon libre, natural son of Vincent Rillieux and Constance Vivant. The words, quadroon libre, stipulated that Norbert was a free African American with more white ancestry than black. 

As heirs to prime New Orleans real estate, a number of free African Americans became quite wealthy before the Civil War. Norbert Rillieux s cousins included members of some of New Orleans richest families. A few of his cousins were so confident of their social status and their ability to pass as white that they signed their names without the required term free man of color, or f.m.c. Many free people of color also invested heavily in slaves. When Norbert Rillieux was in his twenties, more than 700 of New Orleans free African Americans owned an average of three slaves apiece, often family members who were eventually freed. Each of the 23 richest free people of color in New Orleans owned between 10 and 20 slaves. 

Norbert s father, however, surely did not send his son to France to enjoy its heady freedoms but to master its science and sugar technology. Vincent Rillieux, who had invented a steam-operated cotton-baling press, would have understood Louisiana s desperate need for modern technology. 

In any case, the young Rillieux was hardworking, aggressive, and scientifically gifted, and France recognized his talents. By 1830, when Norbert was 24, he was already teaching applied mechanics at the Ecole Centrale in Paris. 

Rillieux s reputation as a young man with modern ideas must have reached Louisiana, however, because Edmund Forstall, a planter and banker in New Orleans, asked him to become the chief engineer of a sugar refinery under construction there. Forstall had already hired Norbert s cousin and brother, who were also young free men of color. 

Great fortunes could be made, and Norbert Rillieux was an ambitious, energetic man. Louisiana sugar growers were wealthier than any other group of Southerners before the Civil War. John Burnside, who started his career as a peddler with a backpack, owned one of the biggest plantation operations on record. His 7600 acres were as flat as a billiard table and worth 1.5 million his 937 slaves were valued at half a million more. 

Norbert Rillieux s diagram accompanying his second U.S. patent. He built the equipment in 1844 at Theodore Packwood s plantation called "Scarsdale" in Louisiana. It was his first apparatus to operate successfully. (From Noel Deerr, The History of Sugar, vol. 2, London Chapman and Hall Ltd., 1950.)... 

Whatever happened, Rillieux was certainly not in New Orleans when a cousin, the Impressionist painter Edgar Degas, came to visit his mother s relatives for five months from 1872 to 1873. Norbert s father was Degas ... 

Anonymous. Norbert Rillieux, Commemoration du Centenaire de la mise en marche de la premiere installation d evaporation dans le vide a triple effet a la Louisiane en 1834. Lousiana State University Special Collections. 

Norbert Rillieux, Chemical Engineer and Free Black Cousin of Edgar... 

Norbert Rillieux. Rillieux s Sugar Machinery. De Bow s Review. V (1848) 291-293. His own description of his process. 

Norbert Rillieux, inventor of the triple-effect evaporator used in sugar processing. 

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