Elijah McCoy

Elijah Joseph McCoy was born on the second of May 1844 at Colchester, Upper Canada — present-day southwestern Ontario — the third of twelve children of George McCoy and Mildred Goins, both formerly enslaved Kentuckians who had escaped via the Underground Railroad to Canada in 1837 and 1840 respectively. The family had cleared and farmed a one-hundred-and-sixty-acre Crown land grant near Colchester. He was educated at the village segregated school of Colchester to the age of fifteen and showed sufficient aptitude in mechanics that his parents borrowed against the farm to send him to Edinburgh in Scotland for apprenticeship as a mechanical engineer. He completed the master-of-mechanical-engineering apprenticeship at Edinburgh between 1859 and 1864.

He returned to the United States in 1866 — his family having moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan, at the end of the Civil War — and was refused engineering employment on grounds of race by every shop he applied to. He accepted in 1866 the only post available to him: fireman and locomotive oiler on the Michigan Central Railroad. The job — the manual application of oil to the moving parts of locomotive driving rods and bearings at every stop — defined the technical problem on which he would spend the next four decades.

He received on the twenty-third of June 1872 United States Patent 129,843 for the automatic lubricator — a graduated drip cup that delivered oil to the moving parts of a steam engine while the engine was operating, eliminating the labour-intensive and accident-prone manual oiling that had previously required all engines to be stopped periodically for lubrication. He filed across the following fifty-seven years a further fifty-six patents, principally refinements of the automatic lubricator for railway, marine and stationary steam engines, of which the 1882 graphite-bearing variant was adopted as the standard for all American railroads. The reliability of the McCoy lubricator and the difficulty of counterfeiting it produced — in the railway purchasing vernacular of the 1890s — the demand for the real McCoy.

He founded the Elijah McCoy Manufacturing Company at Detroit in 1920. He died at the Eloise Infirmary at Wayne County on the tenth of October 1929, at eighty-five.

He is honored here as the inventor of the automatic lubricator.