Elijah McCoy

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Elijah J. McCoy

Elijah J. McCoy (1843/1844?^[1] – 10 October 1929) was a Black Canadian inventor.

1 Life
2 Notes
3 References
4 External links

[edit] 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. In return he was awarded 160 acres (0.65 km²) of land for his service. When he was three, McCoy's family moved back to the U.S., settling in Detroit, Michigan. He had 11 brothers and sisters. McCoy was fascinated by machinery. He studied engineering in Edinburgh, Scotland from age 16 and then immigrated to the United States, settling in Ypsilanti, Michigan.

McCoy had wanted to work as an engineer but was repeatedly frustrated in this goal due to racial discrimination. In 1870, he found work as a fireman and oiler at the Michigan Central Railroad. 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. For this he obtained his first patent, "Improvement in Lubricators for Steam-Engines" (U.S. Patent 129,843 ) on July 23, 1872. 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, allowing trains to run faster and more profitably with less need to stop for lubrication and maintenance.

First page of McCoy's patent on steam engine lubricators

McCoy continued to refine his devices and design new ones, and after the turn of the century attracted notice among his African-American 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 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. 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, when he formed the Elijah McCoy Manufacturing Company. By that time there were several substantial lubricator manufacturers in multiple countries.

McCoy married Ann Elizabeth Stewart in 1868; she died four years later. He remarried the next year to Mary Eleanor Delaney and moved to Detroit. 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.^[2]

In 1975, the city celebrated Elijah McCoy Day, as officials placed a historic marker at the site of his home. The city also named a street for him.

There is no consensus regarding the importance of McCoy's contribution to the field of lubrication. At one extreme, he is credited in some biographical sketches with revolutionizing the railroad or machine industries with his superior devices. At the same time, he is scarcely mentioned in the old lubrication literature; for example, his name is absent in E.L. Ahrons' Lubrication of Locomotives (1922) which does refer to several other early pioneers and companies of the field.

According to some sources, the saying the real McCoy, meaning the real thing, derives from the excellence of Elijah's inventions. The legend is that railroad engineers looking to avoid inferior copies would enquire if a locomotive was fitted with "the real McCoy"; if so they knew it could be driven with confidence. This account is disputed as there are a number of other likely origins to the phrase.

[edit] Notes

^ Sources give his birthdate as May 2, 1843; May 2, 1844; or less commonly March 27, 1843.
^ http://talesofeloise.com/mccoy.html

[edit] References

Martin Rywell (chief compiler) and Charles H. Wesley, et al. (1974). Afro-American Encyclopedia., volume VI. North Miami, FL: Educational Book Publishers.
Harry A. Ploski and Ernest Kaiser (1971). Afro USA: A Reference Work on the Black Experience.. New York, NY: Bellwether Publishing Co., Distributed by Afro American Press.
James C. Williams (Compiler) (1978). At Last Recognition in America: A Reference Handbook of Unknown Black Inventors and their Contribution to America., Volume I. Chicago, IL: BCA Publishing Co..
(1964) Dictionary of American Biography. New York: Scribner's.
Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston, editors (1982). Dictionary of American Negro Biography. New York: Norton.
Russell L. Adams. Illustrated by Eugene Winslow. Edited by David P. Ross, Jr. (1969). Great Negroes, Past and Present. Chicago, Afro-Am Pub. Co..
Negro Almanac. New York: Bellwether Pub. Co..
Haber, Louis (1970). Black Pioneers of Science and Invention. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Haskens, Jim (1991). Outward Dreams.
Hayden, Robert C. (1972). Eight Black American Inventors. Addison-Wesley.
Klein, Aaron E. (1971). The Hidden Contributors. Doubleday.
Towle, Wendy (1993). The Real McCoy. Scholastic.
Carter Godwin Woodson (1928). Negro in Our History. 5th ed.. Washington, D.C.: The Associated Publishers, Inc..
Louis Haber (1966). The Role of the American Negro in the Fields of Science. New York.
(1976) Who Was Who in American History-Science And Technology : A Component of Who's Who in American History. Chicago: Marquis Who's Who.
Booker T. Washington (1909). Story of the Negro, vol. 2..
E.L. Ahrons (1922). Lubrication of Locomotives. London: The Locomotive publishing co..