Elijah J. McCoy was a Canadian-American engineer of African-American descent. He was born free on May 2, 1844, on the Ontario shore of Lake Erie. His parents had escaped enslavement in Kentucky. When his family moved back to the United States in 1847, he became a U.S. resident and citizen. McCoy invented lubrication systems for steam engines. In 2012, the United States Patent and Trademark Office honored his inventions and accomplishments. They named the first regional office in Detroit, Michigan, the "Elijah J. McCoy Midwest Regional Patent Office."

Early life

Elijah McCoy was born in 1844 in Colchester, Ontario, to George and Mildred Goins McCoy. At that time, George and Mildred were escaped slaves who had traveled from Kentucky to Ontario with the help of the Underground Railroad. They arrived in Colchester Township, Essex County, in 1837 through Detroit, which was then part of a region called Upper Canada. Elijah had eleven siblings. Ten of his brothers and sisters were born in Ontario between 1836 and 1859.

In Upper Canada, schools were divided by race under the Common Schools Act, which was changed in 1850. Elijah attended black schools in Colchester Township. When he was 15 years old, in 1859, Elijah traveled to Scotland. There, he worked as an apprentice and later studied at the University of Edinburgh, where he became a mechanical engineer. Records from 1860 and the 1870 US Census show that George McCoy’s family moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan, in the United States between 1859 and 1860. When Elijah returned to the United States, his family had settled on a farm owned by John and Maryann Starkweather in Ypsilanti. George used his skills as a tobacconist to start a business selling tobacco and cigars.

Career

When Elijah McCoy arrived in Michigan, he could only find work as a fireman and oiler for the Michigan Central Railroad. At home, in Ypsilanti, he worked in a machine shop and created improvements and inventions. He invented an automatic lubricator to oil steam engines on trains and ships. He received a patent for this invention in 1872, called "Improvement in Lubricators for Steam-Engines" (U.S. patent 129,843).

Other similar automatic oilers had been patented before, such as the displacement lubricator, which was already widely used. These devices helped railroads by allowing trains to move faster and more efficiently with fewer stops for maintenance. By 1899, the Michigan Bureau of Labor and Industrial Statistics reported that McCoy’s lubricator was used on nearly all North American railroads.

McCoy kept improving his inventions and designing new ones. His work was reported in publications like the Railroad Gazette. Most of his patents focused on lubricating systems, including another invention in 1898 that added a glass tube to check how much oil was being delivered (U.S. patent 614,307).

After the year 1900, McCoy gained recognition among Black people of his time. In Story of the Negro (1909), Booker T. Washington noted that McCoy had more patents than any other Black inventor up to that point. His creativity earned him respect in the Black community, which continues today. He kept inventing until later in life, earning up to 57 patents. Most were related to lubrication, but others included a folding ironing board and a lawn sprinkler. Without enough money to mass-produce his lubricators, he often gave his patent rights to employers or sold them to investors. In 1920, near the end of his career, he started the Elijah McCoy Manufacturing Company.

Regarding the phrase "The real McCoy"

This phrase, which usually means the real thing, is wrongly connected to Elijah McCoy's oil-drip cup invention. A false story claims that railroad workers wanted to avoid fake copies and asked for "the real McCoy system" on locomotives. This idea appears in Elijah McCoy's biography at the National Inventors Hall of Fame. The December 1966 issue of Ebony magazine first linked Elijah McCoy to this phrase in an advertisement for Old Taylor Bourbon, stating, "But the most famous legacy McCoy left his country was his name."

The phrase "the real McCoy" actually comes from Scotland. Its origin has no connection to Elijah McCoy. It has been used as a nickname for many other people with the name McCoy.

Marriage and death

In 1873, McCoy married again to Mary Eleanora Delaney. The couple moved to Detroit when he found a job there. Mary McCoy (died 1923) helped establish the Phillis Wheatley Home for Elderly African American Men in 1898. Elijah McCoy died on October 10, 1929, at the age of 85, at the Eloise Infirmary in Nankin Township, now known as Westland, Michigan. His death was caused by injuries from a car accident that occurred seven years earlier, during which his wife, Mary, also died. He is buried in Detroit Memorial Park East in Warren, Michigan.

In popular culture

• In 1966, an advertisement for Old Taylor bourbon mentioned Elijah McCoy with a photo and the phrase "the real McCoy," ending with the tagline: "But the most famous legacy McCoy left his country was his name."
• In 2006, Canadian playwright Andrew Moodie's play The Real McCoy told the story of McCoy's life, the difficulties he faced as an African American, and the creation of his inventions. The play was first performed in Toronto and later in the United States, such as in Saint Louis, Missouri, in 2011, where it was staged by the Black Rep Theatre.
• In her 2001 novel Noughts & Crosses, Malorie Blackman describes a world where the roles of black and white people are reversed. Elijah McCoy is among the black scientists, inventors, and pioneers mentioned in a history class that Blackman "never learned about in school."
• A 1945 song by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, "Isn't It Kinda Fun," from the musical State Fair, includes the lyrics "…this is the real McCoy."

Legacy

In 1974, the state of Michigan placed a historical marker (P25170) at the McCoys' former home at 5720 Lincoln Avenue and at his gravesite. In 1975, Detroit honored Elijah McCoy Day by placing a historic marker at the site of his home. The city also renamed a nearby street in his honor. In 1994, Michigan installed a historical marker (S0642) at his first workshop in Ypsilanti, Michigan. In 2001, McCoy was added to the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Alexandria, Virginia. In 2012, the Elijah J. McCoy Midwest Regional U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (the first U.S. Patent and Trademark Office satellite office) opened in Detroit, Michigan. In 2022, a Google Doodle appeared in Canada and the United States to mark his 178th birthday on May 2.