Elijah McCoy, Lewis Latimer and Granville Woods: African-American Inventors of the 19th Century — Part 2 — The Inventions — Elijah McCoy

The three inven­tors of focus didn’t have many advan­tages from life in gen­eral. Cer­tainly not what you would expect from men who went on to be ground­break­ing inven­tors. Two were the chil­dren of escaped slaves, the third of mixed race at a time when this was entirely socially unac­cept­able. How­ever, despite what their par­ents were able to pro­vide for them, each man lever­aged his ideas and intel­lect to spur progress and invent things that would change the world for the better.

Eli­jah McCoy
Eli­jah McCoy’s great inven­tion, the one that would secure his name in the Amer­i­can lex­i­con, was some­thing that solved a com­mon prob­lem among all crews of trains – lubri­cat­ing engine parts. In 1870 McCoy took a job with the Michi­gan Cen­tral Rail­road as a fire­man – part of his duties included oil­ing the engine. Crews would often have to stop their loco­mo­tives, some­time for hours on end, and oil the engine to pre­vent over­heat­ing. This caused pas­sen­ger and mail delays and stretched long loco­mo­tive travel times even longer. ³

McCoy thought of a way to erad­i­cate this prob­lem. As he said in his patent appli­ca­tion, in flow­ery lan­guage, “To all whom it may con­cern: Be it known that I, ELIJAH MCCOY, of the city of Ypsi­lanti, in the county of Washt­e­naw and the state of Michi­gan, have invented cer­tain new and use­ful Improve­ments in Lubri­ca­tors; and I do hereby declare that the fol­low­ing is a full, clear, and exact descrip­tion thereof, ref­er­ence being had to the accom­pa­ny­ing draw­ing and to the let­ters of ref­er­ence marked thereon, which form a part of this specification.

“The nature of my inven­tion con­sists in the con­struc­tion and arrange­ment of a lubri­ca­tor for steam-cylinders, as will be here­inafter more fully set forth.”

McCoy then set about explain­ing his incred­i­bly sim­ple but rev­o­lu­tion­ary device: A cov­ered cup, con­tain­ing lubri­cat­ing oil, with a hol­low stem at the bot­tom that had a valve that would be forced upward as steam pres­sure exerted force on the valve. When the steam opened the valve lubri­cat­ing oil would drip out of the cup, dis­pens­ing oil to the engine parts requir­ing the oil.⁴

McCoy took a prob­lem that had plagued engi­neers for decades and solved it with a device so sim­ple yet so invalu­able that com­peti­tors began to copy his inven­tion, lead­ing dis­cern­ing peo­ple with a want for the true arti­cle to ask for “the Real McCoy”.⁵

As a 1903 The Col­ored Amer­i­can put it in an arti­cle about African-American inventors –

“At the head of the list stands the name of Eli­jah McCoy, of Detroit. He has suc­ceeded in plac­ing his lubri­ca­tors on many of the steam-car and steam­boat engines in the North­west, and also on some of the Trans-Atlantic steam­ers. And these are said to net him a hand­some roy­alty.”⁶