Cook’s Patent Evaporator is often described as one of the earliest, if not “the” earliest evaporators to replace the simple flat pan in making maple sugar. Designed by Daniel McFarland Cook, most often identified as D.M. Cook, his sugar evaporator was put to use in evaporating both cane sugar juice and maple sap. Cook began experimenting with his design in the mid-1850s with his first patent (US20631) received in June 1858.
As early as 1859, newspaper accounts began to spread the word of the improved speed and quality of maple sugar Cook’s Patent Evaporator could produce and by the 1860s manufacturers were placing advertisements for its purchase.
Born in 1820 in Mansfield, Ohio, the farm of Cook’s youth included a 1,000 tree sugarbush. With this exposure to the process and methods of making maple sugar in the early part of the 1800s, Cook felt there was a better way. At heart, Cook was a thinker and a tinkerer and it was no surprise that he put his mind to improving and speeding up the oftentimes slow process of boiling maple sap to syrup and sugar. Where Cook improved on the flat pan was in his introduction of a series of continuously winding channels that would push or pull the higher density and warmer sap along through the maze to a point where it could be drawn off as syrup. Cook’s evaporator was faster and used less wood and through the natural process of sap moving through the maze-like channels, the syrup could be drawn off at a density that made it immediately ready for “stirring off” or “sugaring off” into granulated sugar.
His earliest design sat on a portable arch that featured rockers on each side that facilitated making subtle shifts in the flow and level of sap and syrup in the pan. His later improved design that earned him a patent in 1863 saw the evaporator resting on a more permanent brick arch.
As an engineer and inventor, Cook personally never manufactured the Cook’s Evaporator for sale himself, but rather sold the manufacturing and sales rights to a variety of individuals around the country. Cooks Sugar Evaporator was first available only through a number of Ohio firms like Hedges, Free & Co. of Cincinnati; Blymeyer, Bates & Day Co. of Mansfield; and H.W. Wetmore from Akron. Ohio. A few years later, firms all across the maple, sorghum, and cane processing states were making and selling Cook’s evaporator.
In 1863, he improved on his earlier patent design by adding a series of drop flues to the bottom of the back pan. Interestingly, these flues ran transverse to the length of the arch, rather than parallel to the arch and in alignment with the flow of heat and gases from the fire box to the back of the arch and up the stack at the rear. The idea was an excellent design improvement although the execution was not as well refined.
By November 1863, one advertisement from C.C. Post, the first Cook’s Evaporator salesman in Vermont, said there were already 6000 of Cook’s evaporators in use and by 1868 over 20,000 sold. Cook’s innovations in evaporator design set the ball in motion for many more improvements by other inventors and maple producers in the coming years and by the 1880s the Cook’s Sugar Evaporator was already becoming obsolete.
Soon after, other evaporator designs came on the market, such as Cory’s Evaporator discussed in the history of the Vermont Farm Machine Company history. It is especially interesting to note that the engraving image used to illustrate advertisements for Cory’s Evaporator and Cook’s Evaporator by different newspapers in the early 1860s are exactly the same image. Recall however, that the Cory’s Evaporator was not patented until 1861, whereas Cook’s was patented in 1858. Compare the drawing below to the drawing for Cory’s in the Vermont Farm Machine Company history.
It is probably true that Cook’s Evaporator was his most successful invention as far as the impact it made, but it was by no means his most interesting. “Crazy Cook” as he was sometimes called around his home of Mansfield also worked to invent a “flying machine” and a “perpetual electrical generator and engine.” As he told a reporter from Cincinnati in 1886, this machine could run off its own current and power any machine in the world at no cost to run it.
As for the flying machine, Cook built a prototype in 1859 that looked something like a 10-foot tall metal bullet or diving bell with portholes, but that invention never really “got off the ground” so to speak. Miraculously that original model was found to still exist and has been preserved in Mansfield, Ohio.
Unfortunately for Cook, he was never able to turn his genius into long term success and later lost his farm and died a relatively poor man in 1897 at the age of 74.