When Elijah McCoy arrived in Michigan, he could find work only as a
fireman and
oiler at the
Michigan Central Railroad. In a home-based machine shop in Ypsilanti, McCoy also did more highly skilled work, such as developing improvements and inventions. He invented an
automatic lubricator for oiling the steam engines of locomotives and ships, patenting it in 1872 as "Improvement in Lubricators for Steam-Engines" (). Similar automatic oilers had been patented previously; one is the
displacement lubricator, which had already attained widespread use and whose technological descendants continued to be widely used into the 20th century. Lubricators were a boon for
railroads, as they enabled trains to run faster and more profitably with less need to stop for lubrication and maintenance. McCoy continued to refine his devices and design new ones, and was noted in periodicals of the time, including the
Railroad Gazette. Most of his patents dealt with lubricating systems, including a further patent in 1898 which added a glass 'sight-feed' tube to monitor the rate of lubricant delivery (). After the turn of the century, he attracted notice among his
Black contemporaries.
Booker T. Washington, in
Story of the Negro (1909), recognized him as having produced more patents than any other Black inventor up to that time. This creativity gave McCoy an honored status in the Black community that has persisted to this day. He continued to invent until late in life, obtaining as many as 57 patents; most related to lubrication, but others also included a folding
ironing board and a
lawn sprinkler. Lacking the capital with which to manufacture his lubricators in large numbers, he usually assigned his patent rights to his employers or sold them to investors. In 1920, near the end of his career, he formed the Elijah McCoy Manufacturing Company. ==Regarding the phrase "The real McCoy"==