But he was the first engine builder in America, and one of the best of his day.

He gave to his countrymen the high-pressure steam engine and new machinery for manufacturing flour that was not superseded for a hundred years.
* Coleman Sellers, "Oliver Evans and His Inventions," "Journal of the Franklin Institute", July, 1886: vol.CXXII, p.

16.
"Evans was apprenticed at the age of fourteen to a wheelwright.

He was a thoughtful, studious boy, who devoured eagerly the few books to which he had access, even by the light of a fire of shavings, when denied a candle by his parsimonious master.

He says that in 1779, when only seventeen years old, he began to contrive some method of propelling land carriages by other means than animal power; and that he thought of a variety of devices, such as using the force of the wind and treadles worked by men; but as they were evidently inadequate, was about to give up the problem as unsolvable for want of a suitable source of power, when he heard that some neighboring blacksmith's boys had stopped up the touch-hole of a gun barrel, put in some water, rammed down a tight wad, and, putting the breech into the smith's fire, the gun had discharged itself with a report like that of gunpowder.