Elijah McCoy: The Real McCoy
NOTE: I had most of the material for a pretty meaty page about Elijah, but around the end of 2011 I lost a bunch of files in a thumb-drive failure. So, apologies for the failure to give you the attention you deserve, Elijah.
Elijah McCoy was an African American engineer who lived and worked in Detroit in the late 19th and early 20th century. He is believed to have been the subject of the phrase "the real McCoy" because of the quality of his locomotive components. So far 54 patents There are a couple of dozen patents in his name, mostly assigned to Charles C. and Henry C. Hodges, and they are mostly accessible on Google Patents. Sadly a thumb drive failure took a huge amount of information on McCoy with it earlier this year, including photos of many items from the Burton Historical Collection of the Detroit Public Library. Phooey...
McCoy was quite prolific, with 54 patents to his name (that we've been able to find so far); we've compiled a list of his patents, pulled from Google Patents.
http://inventors.about.com/od/mstartinventors/a/Elijah_McCoy.htm