Elijah McCoy

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Elijah McCoy bigraphy, stories - Inventors

Elijah McCoy : biography

March 27, 1844 – October 10, 1929

First page of US patent 129,843 for Improvement in Lubricators for Steam-Engines Elijah J. McCoy (May 2, 1844Sources give his birthdate as May 2, 1843; May 2, 1844; or less commonly March 27, 1843. – October 10, 1929) was a black Canadian-American inventor and engineer, who was notable for his 57 U.S. patents, most to do with lubrication of steam engines. Born free in Canada, he returned as a five-year-old child with his family to the United States in 1847, where he lived for the rest of his life and became a US citizen.

Career

In Michigan, McCoy could find work only as a fireman and oiler at the Michigan Central Railroad. In a home-based machine shop in Ypsilanti, Michigan McCoy also did more highly skilled work, such as developing improvements and inventions. He invented an automatic lubricator for oiling the steam engines of locomotives and ships, "Improvement in Lubricators for Steam-Engines" ().

Similar automatic oilers had been patented previously; one is the displacement lubricator, which had already attained widespread use and whose technological descendants continued to be widely used into the 20th century. Lubricators were a boon for railroads, as they enabled 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; 50 of his patents dealt with lubricating systems. After the turn of the century, he attracted notice among his black contemporaries. Booker T. Washington in Story of the Negro (1909) recognized him as having produced more patents than any other black inventor up to that time. This creativity gave McCoy an honored status in the black community that has persisted to this day. He continued to invent until late in life, obtaining as many as 57 patents. Most of these were related to lubrication, but others also included a folding ironing board and a lawn sprinkler. Lacking the capital with which to manufacture his lubricators in large numbers, he usually assigned his patent rights to his employers or sold them to investors. Lubricators with the McCoy name were not manufactured until 1920, near the end of his career. He formed the Elijah McCoy Manufacturing Company to produce his works.

Historians have not agreed on the importance of McCoy’s contribution to the field of lubrication. He is credited in some biographical sketches with revolutionizing the railroad or machine industries with his devices. Early twentieth-century lubrication literature barely mentions him; for example, his name is absent from E. L. Ahrons’ Lubrication of Locomotives (1922), which does identify several other early pioneers and companies of the field.

Marriage and family

McCoy married Ann Elizabeth Stewart in 1868; she died four years later.

He married for the second time in 1873, to Mary Eleanor Delaney. They moved to Detroit when he found work there. Mary McCoy (b. – d. 1922) was one of the founders of the Phillis Wheatley Home for Aged Colored Men in 1898.

Elijah McCoy died in the Eloise Infirmary (Poorhouse)in Nankin Township now Westland, Michigan October 10, 1929 at the age of 86. He had continued to suffer from injuries from a car accident seven years earlier in which his wife Mary died. He was buried at Detroit Memorial Park East in Warren, Michigan.

In popular culture

  • 1966, an ad for Old Taylor bourbon used a photo of Elijah McCoy and the expression "the real McCoy", ending in this tag line: "But the most famous legacy McCoy left his country was his name.", December 1966. p. 157
  • 2006, the Canadian playwright Andrew Moodie wrote a play called The Real McCoy, which portrays McCoy’s life, the challenges he faced as an African American, and the development of his inventions. It was first produced in Toronto in 2006. It has also been produced in the United States, as in Saint Louis, Missouri in 2011, where it was performed by the Black Rep Theatre.
  • In the book Noughts and Crosses by Malorie Blackman which is set in a fictional racial dystopia where the role of black and white people in society has been reversed, he is mentioned among a list of black scientists, inventors and pioneers when the characters are in a history class. Blackman includes a note at the end of the book about how men mentioned are real but she never learned about them in school. Blackman uses the list to highlight how blacks might be excluded from the history books in favour of White pioneers.