Elijah McCoy - Life

Inventor and manufacturer, born in Canada. His African-American parents had fled from Kentucky to escape slavery. He showed an early talent for mechanical innovations, and in Ypsilanti, MI he devloped lubricators for steam engines (1870). In 1882 he moved to Detroit, where he perfected his lubricating cup, still widely used to provide a steady supply of oil to machinery. He opened the Elijah McCoy Manufacturing Co (1920) and patented an improved airbrake lubricator, one of the some 50 patents he obtained during his lifetime.

Elijah J.

Life

Elijah McCoy was born in Colchester in Essex County, Ontario, Canada, to George McCoy and Mildred Goins, both runaway slaves from Kentucky in the United States, who escaped on the Underground Railroad to Colchester. George McCoy enlisted in the British forces to fight the Riel Rebellion. When he was three, McCoy's family moved back to the U.S., settling in Detroit, Michigan. McCoy was fascinated by machinery.

McCoy had wanted to work as an engineer but was repeatedly frustrated in this goal due to racial discrimination. Working in a home-based machine shop in Ypsilanti, McCoy invented an automatic lubricator for oiling the steam engines of locomotives, boats, and so on. Lubricators were a boon for railroads, allowing trains to run faster and more profitably with less need to stop for lubrication and maintenance.

McCoy continued to refine his devices and design new ones, and after the turn of the century attracted notice among his African-American contemporaries. This prolific output ultimately propelled McCoy to a heroic status in the African American community which has persisted to this day. He continued to invent until late in life, obtaining as many as 57 patents mostly related to lubrication, but also including a folding ironing board and a lawn sprinkler. Lubricators with the McCoy name were not manufactured until 1920, near the end of his career, when he formed the Elijah McCoy Manufacturing Company.

McCoy married Ann Elizabeth Stewart in 1868; Elijah McCoy died in Detroit in 1929 at the age of 85, still suffering from injuries from a car accident seven years earlier that killed his second wife. McCoy had been a resident of the Eloise Hospital, a sanitarium in Westland Michigan, also known as the Michigan State Asylum before his death, suffering from dementia.

In 1975, the city celebrated Elijah McCoy Day, as officials placed a historic marker at the site of his home.

The extent of McCoy's contribution to the field of lubrication is not well established. A number of recent biographical sketches credit him with revolutionizing the railroad or machine industries, some going so far as to say no other oiling devices could compete with his. At the same time, he is scarcely mentioned in the old lubrication literature;

According to some sources, the saying the real McCoy, meaning the real thing, derives from the excellence of Elijah's inventions.