Today in History – 1883 – Jan Matzeliger Patents the shoe “lasting machine”
So this morning I read that on this date in 1885 – John Matzeliger of Suriname patented the shoe lacing machine. I thought that sounded interesting, especially since I had no idea what a shoe lacing machine did? Anyway, what I found when I googled the event was that in 1883 a young man named Jan Matzeliger, who was born in Suriname patented a “shoe lasting machine”. Matzeliger was born in Suriname of a Dutch Father and a black native of Suriname. At an early age Matzeliger showed an aptitude for machines and by the age of 10 he was working in a machine ship that his father supervised. By 1873 he moved to Philadelphia and then on to Lynn, Massachusetts where the shoe industry was booming. He became an apprentice in a shoe factory’. From MIT’s Inventor of the Week: At that time, shoes were made mostly by hand. For proper fit, molds of customers’ feet had to be made with wood or stone called “lasts” from which the shoes were sized and shaped. Though the cutting and stitching of leather involved some degree of mechanization, the final process of shaping and attaching the body of the shoe to its sole was done entirely by hand with “hand lasters.” This was considered the most difficult, tedious part of the assembly and presented a major problem in that workers could not complete the assembly of a shoe as quickly as a machine could produce its parts. In effect, a bottleneck…
