Today’s Black Fact:
Elijah McCoy
Elijah J. McCoy 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. 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 did his own higher skilled work, developing improvements and inventions. He invented an automatic lubricator for oiling the steam engines of locomotives and ships. On July 12, 1872, he obtained his first patent, “Improvement in Lubricators for Steam-Engines.” The saying the real McCoy’, meaning the real thing, has been associated with Elijah McCoy’s invention of an oil-drip cup, for which he was well known. One theory is that railroad engineers’ looking to avoid inferior copies would request it by name, and inquire if a locomotive was fitted with “the real McCoy system”. This possible origin was mentioned in Elijah McCoy’s biography at the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
