Evans was born in Delaware in 1755. He was apprenticed to a wheelwright, and invented a card machine as early as 1777, but never followed it up. In 1785 he built a flour mill in Newcastle County, Del.; and, impatient at the crude methods in use, he began a series of improvements which form the basis of the modern art of handling materials. It has been claimed that Evans stole many of these ideas from the Ellicotts in Maryland. This does not seem probable. Thomas Ellicott wrote a portion of the “Millwright and Millers Guide” which Evans published to help introduce his machinery, and in this Ellicott himself refers to “the elevators, hopper-boys, etc., invented by Oliver Evans, late of Delaware, though now of Philadelphia.” Evans developed a number of closely related transporting devices about which no question is raised and no claims on behalf of the Ellicotts made; and many years later, in 1812, Evans sued those Ellicotts who were then operating for infringement of his patents and obtained judgment. If they could have proved priority it seems natural that they would have done so. Evans’ improvements related chiefly to the movement of materials during the processes of manufacture. He modified the ancient Egyptian chain of pots, used for irrigation, by using an endless belt carrying iron buckets so arranged as to fill with dry material from a boot at the bottom and to empty by gravity into a hopper as they went over the head pulley. He used a belt conveyor for horizontal movement, without however the troughing feature which is a later improvement. When the discharge end was lowest, Evans utilized gravity to drive it, and called it a “descender.” What Evans called a “drill” was an “elevator laid horizontally” and provided with wooden cleats which scraped the grain along the bottom of the box in which it ran, and was nothing more nor less than our modern flight or scraper conveyor. Evans’ “conveyor” was a round, wooden shaft on which he nailed a sheet-iron spiral which pushed the grain along a trough in which the shaft rotated; and when he wished to stir or dry the material as he moved it, he broke up the continuous helix into a number of separate arms arranged spirally. These of course correspond to the modern screw conveyor. His so-called “hopper-boy” consisted of a vertical shaft with a horizontal cross bar at its lower end provided on its lower side with flights which spread the meal for drying, and slowly worked it in a spiral toward a hopper at the center. The angle of the flights was adjustable so that the time allowed for cooling could be varied. He also used pivoted wooden spouts at the discharge of the elevators to deliver the grain into different bins. These improvements are said to have effected a saving of over $30,000 a year in the Ellicott Mill at Patapsco, Md., on an output of 325 barrels a day.[201] In his patents and various books Evans shows nearly all of the modern transporting devices in substantially their