Elijah McCoy and the Real McCoy

The most famous phrase for authenticity exists because one engineer was simply too good to be copied.

Elijah McCoy was a mechanical genius trained in Scotland, but in 1860s America, he was forced to

shovel coal on trains because of his race. He saw how inefficient it was to stop trains constantly for manual

oiling, so he invented a device that oiled the engine while it was still running.

It revolutionized the industry. When companies tried to sell cheap knockoffs that kept failing,

engineers got fed up. They started demanding Elijah’s specific high-quality design,

literally asking for the Real McCoy.