Elijah McCoy

Early life

Elijah McCoy was born on 2 May in Colchester, Canada West (now Ontario). Most sources give the year as 1844; The Canadian Encyclopedia notes 1843 as a possibility. His parents, George McCoy and Mildred (Millie) Goins, had escaped enslavement in Kentucky and reached Canada by way of the Underground Railroad. According to the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the family moved back to the United States when he was small and settled in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

At about fifteen his parents sent him to Edinburgh, Scotland, where he trained and apprenticed as a mechanical engineer.

Work

McCoy returned to North America in the mid-1860s qualified as an engineer, but racial discrimination kept him out of engineering posts. He took a job with the Michigan Central Railroad as a fireman and oilman, shoveling coal and oiling moving parts by hand. Engines then had to stop for oiling.

His answer was an automatic lubricator that used steam pressure to feed oil to moving parts while the engine kept running. He patented this "improvement in lubricators for steam-engines" in 1872, and over roughly forty years he kept refining the oil-drip mechanism as engine designs changed. In 1915, in his seventies, he patented a graphite lubricator for superheater locomotives. The Henry Ford museum holds a brass lubricator from 1882 based on his patented improvements.

He married Mary E. Delaney in 1873, and in 1882 they moved to Detroit, where he worked as a consultant to railroad and engineering firms. Patent counts differ: "over 50" (The Canadian Encyclopedia, National Inventors Hall of Fame), "at least 52" patents and design registrations (The Henry Ford) and 57 U.S. patents (Detroit Historical Society). In 1920 he founded the Elijah McCoy Manufacturing Company.

His later years were hard. He had sold the rights to many of his patents, and he died poor and in failing health at the Eloise infirmary in Wayne County, Michigan, on 10 October 1929.

"The real McCoy"

A common story holds that railroad engineers asked for "the real McCoy" to get his lubricator rather than an imitation. The National Inventors Hall of Fame tells this story approvingly. Other sources are more careful. The Henry Ford calls it a popular belief, and the Detroit Historical Society says the phrase's true origin is unknown. The Canadian Encyclopedia judges the link unlikely. It notes that "the real McKay," referring to a Scottish distiller, appears in an 1856 poem, and that other McCoys have also been credited.

Legacy

In his own era, Booker T. Washington wrote in The Story of the Negro that McCoy held more patents than any other African American inventor of the time, as the Detroit Historical Society notes. Michigan placed a historical marker at his former Detroit home in 1974, and the city later named a street after him. He was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2001. In 2012 the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office opened its first satellite office, in Detroit, and named it for him.