Elijah McCoy

Elijah McCoy was born on 2 May 1844 in Colchester, Ontario, Canada, to parents who had escaped slavery in Kentucky via the Underground Railroad and settled in Canada, where slavery had already been abolished. Recognising his early mechanical aptitude, his parents saved to send him to Edinburgh, Scotland, as a teenager to study mechanical engineering, earning certification as a mechanical engineer, though accounts of the exact scope of his formal training vary among historians.

Despite his qualifications, McCoy returned to North America, settling in Michigan, and found that no engineering firm would hire a Black engineer regardless of his credentials. He instead took a job with the Michigan Central Railroad as a fireman and oiler, a physically demanding role responsible for manually lubricating a locomotive's moving parts, which required regularly stopping the train to apply oil to prevent overheating and mechanical failure — a significant inefficiency in railroad operations at the time.

Drawing on his engineering training, McCoy began developing solutions to this problem in his spare time, and in 1872 patented an automatic lubricating device, the 'lubricating cup,' which used steam pressure to deliver a continuous, regulated flow of oil to a locomotive's moving parts while the train remained in motion, eliminating the need for frequent stops and dramatically improving efficiency and reducing mechanical wear.

McCoy's device proved highly effective and was rapidly adopted across the railroad industry, and he continued refining and patenting improved versions of the technology over subsequent decades, eventually holding 57 US patents by the end of his career, the majority related to lubrication technology though also including other mechanical inventions such as an ironing board and a lawn sprinkler.

As McCoy's lubricating devices became industry standard, other manufacturers began producing cheaper, less effective imitations, leading railroad engineers and buyers reportedly to specifically request 'the real McCoy' when purchasing lubrication equipment, to ensure they were getting McCoy's genuinely effective original design rather than an inferior copy. This phrase is widely, though not universally, credited by etymologists as the origin of the common English idiom 'the real McCoy,' meaning the genuine, authentic version of something.

McCoy faced ongoing barriers throughout his career despite his inventive success: he was repeatedly unable to secure the capital needed to manufacture and market his own inventions at full scale, often having to sell his patent rights to established manufacturers for considerably less than the technology's ultimate commercial value. He eventually founded the Elijah McCoy Manufacturing Company in 1920 to produce his devices directly, though he died in 1929 in relative financial modesty compared to the industrial impact of his inventions. In 2001 McCoy was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and in 2012 the United States Patent and Trademark Office named its Detroit satellite office in his honour, the first such office named for an individual inventor.