Mildred Goins McCoy was enslaved in Kentucky in the 1830s but eventually managed to escape in 1837 through the famous Underground Railroad.
She fled to Colchester, Ontario in Canada and eventually gave birth to a son in 1844.
Elijah McCoy.
Early on, Elijah was a brilliant young mind. So much so that Mildred sent her son to Edinburgh, Scotland at age 15 to study mechanical engineering at the University of Edinburgh.
This wasn’t a matter of hopping on a flight from JFK back then. Her genius 15-year-old son took the two-week-long boat ride across the Atlantic to Scotland and began his schooling.
Before age 22, he earned his engineering degree and then went on to complete an advanced apprenticeship in mechanical engineering. Ready to return to North America.
Elijah McCoy returned to America in about 1866, joining his family who had moved to Ypsilanti, Michigan.
Despite his advanced mechanical-engineering training, nobody would hire him as an engineer because of America’s obsession with racial discrimination.
Needing work and a paycheck, he took a job with Michigan Central Railroad as a fireman and oiler — a physically demanding, lower-status and lower-paying job far far below his qualifications.
Mind you, this wasn’t Alabama or Mississippi or South Carolina, which had only ended slavery a year prior. This was the so-called enlightened free North!
His job at the railroad required him to shovel coal into the locomotive’s firebox, oil the engine’s axles, bearings and other moving parts and apply lubricant while trains were stopped.
But McCoy noticed a major railroad problem when doing that work. Trains had to stop repeatedly so workers could lubricate their machinery. So, with his engineering training, he went to work in his home workshop and invented an automatic lubricating device that allowed oil to flow to the moving parts while the engine remained in operation and the train moving.
McCoy received his first patent for that invention in 1872.
A patent gives the owner the right to stop anyone else from making or using the same invention without the patent owner’s permission.
He would go on to obtain 57 more patents in his lifetime. Many to improve how trains operated. But he also invented things like the lawn sprinkler and folding ironing board.
His engine lubricating inventions were so useful that many other engineers across the country tried to come up with their own systems that were different and better than McCoy’s. Nobody could come close. Even today, modern railroads still rely heavily on that basic engineering principle developed by McCoy.
Elijah McCoy’s improvements would stand the test of time. Railroad companies widely preferred McCoy’s technology over the attempted copycats.
And that, my friends, is how it became known as the Real McCoy.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Radu Vladislav On Unsplash
