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 1852 in what is now Paramaribo, Surinam, to a Dutch father and a Surinamese mother who had been enslaved. From an early age, Matzeliger understood a great deal about working with machines. At just 10 years old, he began working in the machine shops supervised by his father.

At age 19, Matzeliger began working as a sailor on a merchant ship. In 1873, he settled in Philadelphia, and by 1877 he had moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, where he became an apprentice in a shoe factory.

At the time, shoes were usually made by hand. The process required custom molds of a customer’s feet using lasts made of wood or stone to ensure a proper fit. While the cutting and stitching of leather involved some mechanization, shaping and attaching the outside of the shoe to the sole was done entirely by hand, making for a tedious and time-consuming process.

Matzeliger became determined to speed up the process of manufacturing shoes. 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 diligently on his own time after long days at the factory.

Matzeliger built his first model out of wooden cigar boxes, elastic and wire. 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. However, after two years of perseverance, Matzeliger’s prototype was complete. His device was so complex, patent examiners needed to see it in operation to understand it.

Having earned a patent for his device in 1883, Matzeliger continued improving upon his invention until it could produce 700 pairs of shoes per day. This was a dramatic increase over the 50 pairs a skilled laster could make by hand each day. As a result, shoe prices dropped by nearly half, making quality shoes affordable to a great number of people for the first time.

By 1889, Matzeliger’s shoe-lasting machine was overwhelmingly in demand. The Consolidated Lasting Machine Co. was formed to manufacture the machines, and Matzeliger was given a large amount of the organization’s stock. However, that same year, Matzeliger died of tuberculosis just one month before he would have turned 37. The United Shoe Machinery Co. then obtained his patent and company stock.

Thanks in large part to his invention, Lynn, Massachusetts, came to be known as “The Shoe Capital of the World.” To recognize Matzeliger’s technological impact and enduring legacy, a Black heritage postage stamp was issued in his honor in 1991.