Jan Ernst Matzeliger, African-American Inventor (1852-1889)

You may not know it but every time you put on a pair of shoes, you owe a debt of gratitude to the genius of Jan Ernst Matzeliger, a young black immigrant from Dutch Guiana (located on the  northeast coast of South America and now known as Surinam). Because of his efforts, the American shoe industry was revolutionized by his invention of the shoe-lasting machine.

In the 19th century, shoe lasting--attaching the upper leather of the shoe to the sole--was done by hand. The work was so slow that the hand lasters could not keep up with the pace of the machines producing other shoe parts and consequently the work would pile up. This limited the number of shoes made and caused shoe prices to soar. No one thought a machine would ever be built that could duplicate the finger work of skilled hand lasters and thus speed up production. Several models were tried and they all failed.

Then along came Matzeliger. When he arrived in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1876 (the largest shoe manufacturing center in the United States in a state responsible for more than half of the country's shoes), his mechanical skills and his previous employment as a cobbler's apprentice proved useful when he landed a job in a shoe factory. While there he learned to operate most of the machines involved in the shoemaking process. (He also attended night classes where he studied English and  became an excellent student.)

His decision to build a shoe-lasting machine made him a laughingstock. But this did not deter him. After spending as much time as he could watching the finger work of the hand lasters and studying physics and mechanics from books and experimentation,  he fashioned a model from wood, old cigar boxes, and other scrap materials. He then began building the real thing out of parts from discarded machines. He completed a second and more durable version and received a patent on it in March of 1883. In the spring of 1885, the machine underwent a successful factory test run. Because certain parts for this version had to be made to order, Matzeliger
sought the financial backing of two local businessmen who received two-thirds ownership of the machine. When additional capital was needed to begin large-scale production of the machine, two more financiers answered the call.

Matzeliger's machine became quite a success because of its capacity to turn out as many as 700 pairs of shoes a day. (The hand lasters could only do 50 pairs a day.) This improvement in productivity cut the price of shoes in half. By 1889 there was a worldwide demand for the shoe-lasting machine which eventually became known in the shoe industry as the "Niggerhead Laster," because of its inventor. (In 1888 he received a patent on a third model.)

One of Matzeliger's backers made a fortune from the machine by forming a shoe machinery company that bought up other such companies and became, as a result of this merging, a multi-million-dollar monopoly. Unfortunately for Matzeliger, it was not possible for him to share in this wealth beyond owning some stock certificates in the shoe machinery companies.

In 1886 Matzeliger caught a cold at a rained out church picnic. His weakened condition, due to lack of food and warmth (he had very little money) and ceaseless labor during the time he was designing and building the machine, caused him to contract tuberculosis, a common ailment among shoe factory workers at that time. He remained bedridden for the next three years. This prevented him from completing work on a fourth version of the shoe-lasting machine. In 1889, only three weeks short of his 37th birthday, he succumbed to his illness and was buried in the Pine Grove Cemetery in Lynn.

A very important tribute to his invention and to his genius came in the form of a gold medal. It was awarded posthumously at the Pan American Exposition, held in Philadelphia in 1901, where the most advanced machinery of the day was put on display.

This article was originally published on the front page of the Harlem Weekly newspaper in 1983.