Elijah McCoy
(1843-1929)

Elijah McCoy was born in 1843 in Ontario, Canada.  His parents were former slaves from Kentucky who had escaped to freedom in Canada via the Underground Railroad.  After the Civil War, the McCoys moved back to the United States, settling in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where the senior McCoy found employment in the logging industry.  In Ypsilanti, Elijah attended school until he was fifteen and worked in a machine shop.  Afterwards, his parents found him an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering in Edinburgh, Scotland.  They sent him to Scotland with money they had saved for his education.  When Elijah returned from Scotland he was a fully trained mechanical engineer, but because he was African American, he found it impossible to get employment in this field. 

Instead, he went to work for the Michigan Central Railroad as a fireman; his duties included loading wood into the furnaces of the locomotives, and oiling the moving parts.  It was necessary for the trains to stop every so often so that the parts could be oiled.  As this was about seventeen years before Granville Woods (see a previous column) invented a system to allow trains to communicate with one another, the periodic stopping to oil the parts occasionally resulted in collisions, as one train would be stopped on the tracks when another was approaching rapidly from behind it.  McCoy thought this problem could be solved if he could develop a mechanical oiling device to keep the parts oiled automatically without stopping the train.  He worked on designing and testing self-lubricating devices for a couple of years and in 1872 patented one which worked well.  It became so successful that copycat oiling devices were made, prompting buyers of the device to insist on having “The Real McCoy.”  The oiling device not only improved safety and efficiency of the railroads, but was adapted for use in manufacturing machinery, allowing factories to run their machinery non-stop.  

McCoy considered a later invention, the graphite lubricator for cylinders on locomotives, to be his greatest creation.  McCoy continued to invent things throughout his life, including a lubricating device for air brakes, a folding ironing board, and a lawn sprinkler.  He was married twice (his first wife died the year he received his first patent) and he was said by contemporaries to be a kind man who encouraged young African American children to obtain the best possible education.  He established the Elijah McCoy Manufacturing Company in Detroit, Michigan, in 1920 to manufacture some of his own inventions.  By the end of his life, McCoy had patented 57 inventions.  He held patents in the United States, Canada, and several European countries. [] 

Susan Robinson 
  

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