Founder1844–1929 · manufacturing
Elijah McCoy
A lubrication-engineering practice sold to the railroads as patents, over 50 of them; a company under his own name only from 1920
- Route through work
- Learned a trade and sold the skill
1 · What failed
Trained in Edinburgh as a mechanical engineer, he came home to find engineering positions closed to him, and the Michigan Central hired him as a fireman and oiler instead. For decades he lacked the capital to manufacture what he invented; the company bearing his name came only in 1920, funded by selling rights to some of his patents.
2 · What it cost
A 1922 automobile accident killed his wife Mary and left him with injuries he carried until his death in 1929.
This field is the reason the archive exists. A record of the win without the years it took is a highlight reel, and highlight reels are how people get hurt.
3 · What worked
The oiling he was hired to do by hand, he automated: his 1872 lubricator patent let steam engines oil themselves while running, and the railroads adopted it. He kept patenting for five more decades, over 50 patents, nearly all in lubrication.
4 · The lesson
A trade is portable in a way a job title is not: the door marked 'engineer' was closed, so he sold the engineering itself — as patents — to the same industry that would not hire him for it.
Where this comes from
Last verified 2026-08-24
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Every route now has at least one figure
The archive names 5 routes through work — employment, trade, ownership, investing, and combinations of them — and each one now documents at least one journey, with its failure and its cost on the page.
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Journeys that rhyme with this one
Same field, or the same route through work. Nothing here says they turned out alike.