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The invention of the strappy sandal is well documented back to biblical times. However, the development of a shoe with an attached top and bottom took some doing. They said it couldn’t be done. But, immigrant Jan Matzelinger proved them all wrong by inventing the first shoe lasting machine out of cigar boxes in his basement. His invention spurred a mass production that made shoes affordable and available to many Americans for the first time. Matzelinger left what money he had to his church and to the United Shoe Machinery Corporation, owner of his patent. The company was said to be worth over a billion dollars just sixty-five years after his death. Imagine the net worth of this invention today? Inventor In-depth:At the time of his death, Jan Matzelinger was (and is still) known by few outside the shoe-manufacturing world. However, his invention is the cornerstone on which the shoe industry, both domestically and internationally, is built. It’s an invention that changed the social fabric of the country by making shoes available to the rich and poor alike.
Born in 1852 in Paramaribo, Surinam (Dutch Guiana) the son of a Surinamese homemaker and a Dutch engineer, Jan Matzelinger learned a great deal about machinery while working in the machine shops his father supervised from the age of 10. At the age of 19, he took to the seas and traveled around the world before immigrating to the United States two years later. He faced harsh discrimination for his race but quickly learned English and landed a series of odd jobs before settling in Lynn, Pennsylvania home to most of the country’s shoe manufacturing at the time. He worked in a shoe factory and found friendship and support through the North Congregational Church in Lynn where he later taught Sunday school. By the 1870s, the shoe industry was somewhat automated with machines that were able to assemble all of the pieces of the shoe, however, the final step of attaching of the top of the shoe to the sole was still managed by expert “hand-lasters”. Naturally, the lasters formed a union of sorts and threatened work slow downs in the name of high wages. These salaries combined with low production meant that shoes were too expensive for the average person. Other inventors attempted to design a lasting machine with no success and it was commonly thought that the development of a lasting machine was not possible. Matzelinger worked on his invention patiently and tirelessly over the course of ten years. And, when word leaked out about his secret project many people scoffed at the idea while others tried unsuccessfully to buy the machine from Matzelinger for large sums of money.
When Matzelinger introduced his automatic shoe lasting machine, the contraption, made out of wire, wood and cigar boxes, was so complex that scientists from the U.S. Patent Office in Washington were sent to inspect the invention before patent number 274,207 was granted on March 20, 1883. Soon after the Union Lasting Machine Company was developed to meet the high demand for the invention. Up until this time, professional shoe lasters were able to sew forty to fifty pair of shoes a day. Matzelinger’s machine generated 150-700 pair of shoes daily thereby driving the cost down and the availability up. Shoes were now available to more Americans than ever before. Matzelinger worked on other inventions but was ill with tuberculosis. His long hours of work took their toll and he died on August 24, 1889 at the age of 37. He left what money he had to his church and to the Union Lasting Company, which owned his patent.
Sources for this biography and links for learning more about Jan Matzelinger:Source: African-American Inventors& Inventions: Jan Ernst Matzelinger – Inventor and Businessman. Information derived from Sidney Kaplan. “Jan Ernst Matzelinger and the Making of the Shoe,” Journal of Negro History, XL (January, 1958), pp. 8-33; Hayden, Robt. C., Eight Black American Inventors, Addison-Wesley, 1972
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