Matzeliger's machine brought shoes to the masses

Matzeliger's machine brought shoes to the masses.

By Kweku Ofori

Jan Ernst Matzeliger was born in Dutch Guiana, the South American country now called Suriname. He worked in machine shops as a child. In the 1870s, he immigrated to the United States and eventually settled in Lynn, Mass., where he found work at a shoe factory.

Invention: In 1883, Matzeliger successfully invented what many before him had attempted: an automated the shoemaking machine that quickly attached the top of the shoe to the sole. This process is called "lasting". Matzeliger's machine could produce more than 10 times what human hands could create in a day. This invention revolutionized the shoemaking industry and made shoes affordable to the average person.

Matzeliger's first shoemaking machine model was made out of cigar boxes, elastic, and wire. He enabled the creation of the modern shoe industry and billions of dollars of economic value, and affordable shoes for ordinary people everywhere.

While Matzeliger had labored in obscure secret, news of his invention had begun to spread. He endured the mockery of the hand lasters, who still believed such a machine was impossible and attempted to dissuade him from the pursuit. 

He also received exploitative offers of anywhere from $50 to $1,500 for the rights to his design. Holding out for a more favorable arrangement, Matzeliger eventually found two investors who contributed adequate funding in return for two-thirds ownership, leaving the inventor with one-third. This infusion of capital enabled him to complete a second and third working prototype and to file for a patent in 1882.

The 15-page document was so complex that the patent examiners couldn’t understand it or believe that a machine could perform these tasks. A representative was sent to Lynn to observe the prototype for himself. In March 1883, the U.S. Patent Office granted Patent Number 274,207 to Matzeliger for a “Lasting Machine.” Over the course of the next two years, he would perfect the basic design to the point where a Matzeliger Lasting Machine could make 700 pairs of shoes a day, 14 times the number previously made by hand. The demand for the machine grew quickly. A company was formed in 1889, The Consolidated Lasting Machine Company, in which Matzeliger retained substantial ownership. The United Shoe Machine Company subsequently purchased the patent, leading to a 50 percent reduction in the price of shoes, a doubling of wages for shoe factory workers, and improved working conditions. The company would eventually be worth $1 billion.

Matzeliger earned substantial wealth from the success of his invention, but would not live long to enjoy it. With his poor constitution, a cold developed into tuberculosis and led to his death on August 24, 1889, at the early age of 37. With no wife or heirs, he left most of his estate to the church that had accepted and befriended him. Matzeliger also left a legacy of successfully meeting an “impossible” challenge, making shoes affordable, and creating a large number of jobs and a global industry. All shoe manufacturing today uses the mechanical principles he developed. He was nevertheless absent from the historical record for decades. The town of Lynn, Massachusetts named a bridge after him in 1984 and installed a statue of Matzeliger downtown, and his church commemorated him in 1967.