Elijah McCoy: The Railroad Oiler Who Invented the Automatic Lubricator

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Elijah J. McCoy was born free on May 2, 1844, in Colchester, Ontario, one of 12 children of George and Mildred Goins McCoy, who had escaped slavery in Kentucky via the Underground Railroad and reached Canada in 1837. After segregated schooling, he was sent at 15 in 1859 to study at the University of Edinburgh and returned a trained mechanical engineer. His family had moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan, but no company would hire a Black engineer, and the Michigan Central Railroad took him on as a fireman and oiler. Trains then had to stop so oilers could walk around the hot engine with a can. In 1872 he received U.S. Patent 129,843 for a hydrostatic lubricator that used condensed steam to push oil into the cylinders while the train ran.

By 1899 Michigan's labor bureau reported his lubricator on almost all North American railroads. McCoy earned as many as 57 patents but, lacking capital, often sold or assigned his rights to employers and investors. He married Mary Eleanora Delaney in 1873 and moved to Detroit, where she helped found the Phyllis Wheatley Home for aged men in 1898. In 1920 he finally founded the Elijah McCoy Manufacturing Company, but a 1922 car crash killed Mary and left him badly hurt. He died at the Eloise Infirmary on October 10, 1929, at 85.

• An 1898 improvement added a glass sight feed tube so engineers could watch the oil drip.
• His other inventions included a folding ironing board and a lawn sprinkler.
• Booker T. Washington's 1909 The Story of the Negro credited him with more patents than any other Black inventor to that time.
• The phrase the real McCoy is an older Scottish idiom, though a 1966 Old Taylor bourbon ad in Ebony tied it to him.
• In 2012 the USPTO opened its first regional office in Detroit and named it after him.