Jan Ernst Matzeliger was born on September 15, 1852, and died on August 24, 1889. He was an inventor from Suriname and America who created an automated lasting machine that greatly changed how shoes were made. A company called the Consolidated Lasting Machine Company was started to produce his shoe-making machines.
Biography
Matzeliger was born in Dutch Guiana, now known as Suriname. His father, Ernst Carel Matzeliger Jr. (1823–1864), was a Dutchman with German roots who lived in Paramaribo, the capital of Dutch Guiana. Ernst owned and ran a business called Colonial Shipworks, which had been in his family for three generations. His mother was a house slave of African descent who lived on a plantation owned by his father for a time.
At age ten, Matzeliger began training in the Colonial Shipworks in Paramaribo. He showed a natural talent for working with machines and tools. At nineteen, he left Dutch Guiana and worked as a mechanic on a ship traveling to the Dutch East Indies. Later, he moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he learned the shoe-making trade. By 1877, he could speak English well (Dutch was his first language) and moved to Massachusetts to work in the shoe industry. He eventually began working at the Harney Brothers Shoe factory.
In 1883, Matzeliger received a patent for his invention of a machine that helped shape shoes automatically. A skilled worker could make about 50 pairs of shoes in a ten-hour day, but Matzeliger’s machine could produce between 150 and 700 pairs per day. This invention helped lower shoe prices by half across the United States.
Matzeliger died at age 36 in Lynn, Massachusetts, from tuberculosis. He did not live to see the full success of his invention. In 1967, The First Church of Christ honored him, calling his machine “the most important invention for New England” and “the greatest forward step in the shoe industry.”
In 1991, the United States Postal Service released a 29-cent stamp in his honor. The stamp, designed by Barbara Higgins Bond, is part of the Black Heritage Stamp Series and shows an image of Matzeliger. In 2006, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.
Patents
- 274,207, 20 March 1883, A method to make shoes last longer automatically
- 421,954, 25 February 1890, A machine for driving nails
- 423,937, 25 March 1890, A device to separate and spread tacks
- 459,899, 22 September 1891, A machine for shaping shoes
- 415,726, 26 November 1899, A system to distribute tacks, nails, and other fasteners