Elijah McCoy
Trained as an engineer in Scotland, hired as an oiler, and invented the device that kept trains running
Elijah McCoy was born in Colchester, Ontario, to parents who had fled slavery in Kentucky on the Underground Railroad. The family later moved back across the border to Michigan, where his father worked in the timber trade. Elijah was fascinated by machines, and at 15 his parents sent him to Edinburgh in Scotland, where he served an apprenticeship and qualified as a mechanical engineer.
When he returned to Michigan no company would hire a Black man as an engineer. The Michigan Central Railroad gave him a job as a fireman and oiler, shovelling coal into the locomotive and, at every stop, climbing down to oil its moving parts by hand. Trains had to halt regularly for the purpose. McCoy set about designing a cup that would drip oil steadily onto the bearings while the engine was running.
He patented his automatic lubricator in 1872 and kept improving it for the next fifty years. Railways and steamship lines fitted it across America, and versions were used on factory machinery and ocean liners. He could rarely afford to manufacture his inventions himself and sold most of the patent rights cheaply, which is why he was not rich. He held 57 patents in all, including one for a folding ironing board.
In 1920 he finally founded his own company in Detroit. Two years later a car accident killed his wife and left him badly injured, and he died in an infirmary in 1929.