Jan Ernst Matzeliger: Inventor of the Lasting Machine

Jan Ernst Matzeliger (1854 - 1889) Inventor of the lasting machinePublic domain

Jan Matzeliger was born into slavery to Ernst Carel Matzeliger Jr., a wealthy Dutch business and plantation owner, and Aletta, a house slave of African descent. The Colonial Shipworks, a machine and ship-building shop, had been in Ernst’s family for three generations and he inherited the responsibility of overseeing the business from his father, along with the family’s coffee plantation. Whether Aletta was made free after giving birth to Ernst’s son is still disputed, but it is thought than Jan was made free as a young boy.

Jan displayed a talent for mechanics even before he hit double digits. By just ten years old, he was working in the Colonial Shipworks alongside his father in Paramaribo, Suriname. At nineteen, Matzeliger decided to leave Suriname and seek work in the US. He worked as a sailor for two years before settling in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1873. Unable to speak English, Matzeliger took work doing whatever he could but lived a somewhat lonely life. He spent most of his spare time reading and studying alone.

By 1877, Matzeliger could speak English reasonably well and began working as an apprentice in a shoe factory in Lynn, Massachusetts. Before long, he had noticed an industry-wide problem. At that time shoes were largely made by hand, sized and shaped using ‘lasts,’ molds of the customers’ feet made with wood or stone. Workers would stitch the leather to the soles, an arduous process which made it impossible for even most skilled hand lasters to keep up with the machines producing the separate parts.

A fiercely talented mechanic, Matzeliger began designing a machine which could attach the soles to the rest of the shoe in record time. By 1883, he had developed the first automated shoe-lasting machine and applied for his first patent. The result was astonishing. A hand laster could complete less than fifty pairs in a ten-hour working day, whereas Matzeliger’s lasting machine could produce around seven hundred in the same time frame, cutting the price of making shoes in half.

By 1889 the lasting machine had become an indispensable part of the shoe-making industry and Matzeliger had moved onto new inventions. Unlike his first few years in the US, Matzeliger found himself surrounded by friends after establishing himself within the North Congregational Church community. Long gone were the days when he would sit alone with his head buried in a book. He dedicated much of his spare time to teaching Bible studies and oil painting at the Sunday School.

Sadly, on August 24^th, 1889, Jan Matzeliger died after contracting tuberculosis. He was only thirty-six years old. In 1991, the US Postal Service produced a stamp designed by Barbara Higgins Bond to honor Matzeliger’s undeniable impact on US industry. In 2006, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Though quiet, Jan Matzeliger was a zealous innovator and gifted engineer.