Oliver Evans, America's First Engineer

No biography of Oliver Evans is in print. The only book-length biography is Greville and Dororothy Bathe’s Oliver Evans, A Chronicle of Early American Engineering, published by The Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, 1935.

Evans’s The Young Mill-Wrights and Miller’s Guide (1795) and The Abortion of the Young Steam Engineer’s Guide (1805) are also out of print, but the first editions were reprinted in facsimile in 1990 by the Oliver Evans Press. The full text of the Steam guide is available on-line at: www.history.rochester.edu/steam/evans/1805/title.htm

Other sources used in the story include:

Oliver Evans, Inventive Genius of the American Industrial Revolution by Eugene S. Ferguson, The Hagley Museum, Greenville, Delaware 1980

American Inventors by C. J. Hylander, The Macmillan Company, New York 1934

A Sketch of the Life of Oliver Evans, A remarkable Mechanic and Inventor by Rev. George A. Latimer, Published by John C. Harkness, Wilmington, Delaware 1872