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Jan Ernst Matzeliger

Jan Matzeliger invented the automatic shoe lasting machine, mechanizing the complex process of joining a shoe sole to its upper, and revolutionizing the shoe industry.

Matzeliger was born in Dutch Guiana (now Suriname) and was self-educated. He immigrated to the United States at age twenty, and ran a shoe-stitching machine for a manufacturer in Lynn, Massachusetts. Observing the hand lasters at the factory, he resolved to mechanize the one remaining manual bottoming process. With reference books and a secondhand set of drafting instruments, Matzeliger worked on his own time after long days at the factory. He built his first model out of wooden cigar boxes, elastic, and wire. After two years, his prototype was complete.

Because of the complex movements required to stretch shoe leather around a last, and the importance of the lasting process to the final look of a shoe, earlier attempts to mechanize the process had failed. Matzeliger's device was so complex that patent examiners had to see it in operation to understand it.

Matzeliger improved his invention

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Jan Ernst Matzeliger invented a shoemaking machine that increased shoemaking speed by 900%. Jan Matzeliger conceived, patented, built working models, and factory-tested a machine known as a shoe-lasting machine, and he eventually became a stockholder in the company that manufactured it. Matzeliger's shoe-lasting machine could produce 150 to 700 pairs of shoes a day.

Jan Matzeliger was born on September 15, 1852, in the port city of Paramariboin Dutch Guiana, now known as Surinam. His mother was a native Surinamese of African descent, and his father, a Dutch engineer who had been sent to the island colony to take charge of the government machine works, was a well-educated man and a member of a wealthy and aristocratic Dutch family.

Jan served as an apprentice in a government machine shop supervised by his father. He developed an interest in machines, eventually becoming a skilled machinist. At the age of 19 he signed on as a seaman with the Dutch East Indies Company and went to sea. He helped fix the engines on the steamship to which he was assigned. He spent two

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Jan Matzlieger

Jan Ernst Matzeliger was born in 1852 in Paramaribo, Surinam (Dutch Guiana) to a Dutch engineer father and a native black Surinamese mother. The enterprising youngster showed early mechanical aptitude, and at just ten years old, he was already working in the machine shops that his father supervised. When he was 19, he left Surinam to sail the world and later to seek work in the United States. In 1873, he settled in Philadelphia.

By 1877, Matzeliger had learned to speak English. He moved to Lynn, Massachusetts to look for work after he heard about the town’s rapidly growing shoe industry. There, he became an apprentice in a shoe factory.

At that time, shoes were made mostly by hand. For proper fit, molds of customers’ feet had to be made with wood or stone called “lasts” from which the shoes were sized and shaped. Though the cutting and stitching of leather involved some degree of mechanization, the final process of shaping and attaching the body of the shoe to its sole was done entirely by hand with “hand lasters.” This was considered the most difficult an