Oliver Evans
Oliver Evans was an American inventor who, from 1785, built an automated flour mill in Delaware in which bucket elevators, screw conveyors, and other devices moved grain through every step without manual carrying.
What they did and why it matters
Evans built what is often called the first fully automated industrial process, and his idea of linking machines with continuous material handling is the ancestor of conveyor-based warehouses. In his mill, bucket elevators lifted grain to the top floor and screw conveyors and gravity moved it through cleaning, grinding, and packing with little human effort. The individual devices were not new, but integrating them into one flow was. Modern fulfillment centers that connect receiving, storage, picking, packing, and sortation with conveyors and controls apply the same principle of continuous, linked flow.
Related people
Events
Sources
- Oliver Evans (1755-1819) (The Mills Archive) millsarchive.org
- Oliver Evans builds the first automated flour mill (History of Information) historyofinformation.com