The real McCoy
Evan Zabawski | TLT From the Editor July 2009
A common expression may have had its roots in lubrication.
Elijah McCoy’s patented automatic lubricators were aboon to the railroad industry.
Everyday expressions often have interesting origins. For example, if you ever talked about putting your “best foot forward” or “breaking the ice” or refusing “to budge an inch” or having “elbow room” or “coming full circle” or having “neither rhyme nor reason” or doing something in “one fell swoop,” then you are quoting Shakespeare. But where did the expression the real McCoy come from?
Years ago I read a book called
Canada Firsts, ironically penned by Ralph Nader, an American. I learned we have Canadians to thank for basketball, Macintosh apples, ginger ale, the telephone, green ink, the paint roller, half of Superman, the zipper, Trivial Pursuit, the first patent of an incandescent light bulb (Thomas Edison later bought a share of it) and the real McCoy.
The book recounted that back in 1872 an African-Canadian named Elijah McCoy patented an automatic lubricator for the railroad industry and that it was so popular and so poorly imitated that buyers would demand that their automatic lubricators be “the real McCoy.”
Factually, lubricators were a boon to railroads, allowing trains to run without stopping for relubrication—resulting in faster trips and higher profits. John Ramsbottom patented the first commercial displacement lubricator in 1860 followed in 1862 by James Roscoe, who thought to add a regulator valve to control the rate of delivery.
Over the next 10 years many other designs were introduced before McCoy registered his first of 72 patents (mostly related to lubrication but also including a folding ironing board and a lawn sprinkler). This patent was very similar to John Sees’ patent in 1863 and came one year after Nicholas Seibert’s patent of a hydrostatic lubricator. In 1922 Ernest Leopold Ahrons would write in his book
Lubrication of Locomotives that the Roscoe lubricator dominated the market for 25 years after its invention until sight-feed type lubricators superceded it.
McCoy’s design was neither unique, nor the first, nor likely the most popular, yet the annals of science and history have made the connection between his invention and a common phrase and gone so far as to refer to him as the Father of Lubrication. When Elijah McCoy was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 2001, the inductors reiterated the attribution of the phrase the real McCoy to his invention. With little evidence to suggest this to be true, what other possibilities exist?
The Scottish National Dictionary says, “The phrase ‘Real Mackay’ was adopted as an advertising slogan by Messrs. G. Mackay and Co., whiskey distillers of Edinburgh, in 1870 and must have been already current by that date.” Coincidentally, Elijah earned his credentials as master mechanic and engineer when he went to school from 1860-1865 in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Many other theories abound from a welterweight boxing champion having so many imitators he needed to bill himself as the real McCoy to a prohibition-era rum-runner named Bill McCoy, who brought down high quality Canadian rum, to a reference to Macau being a part of China where high quality heroin could be found.
My personal pride as a Canadian in the lubrication industry wants to believe we owe this expression to a lubricator, but rightfully I will just have to accept the Oxford English Dictionary’s appraisal: “Its origin remains uncertain.”
Evan Zabawski, CLS, is a training and consultant specialist for The Fluid Life Corp. in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. You can reach him at evan@fluidlife.com.