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 was created.Matzeliger set out to find a solution to this problem. He thought there had to be a way to develop an automatic method for lasting shoes. He began coming up with designs for machines that could do the job. He experimented with wooden models, then iron models, and finally, in 1883, he applied for a patent on a “lasting machine.”
On March 20, 1883, Matzeliger received patent number 274,207 for a machine that held a shoe on a last, gripped and pulled the leather down around the heel, set and drove in the nails, and then discharged the completed shoe. His machine could turn out between 150 to 700 pairs of shoes a day, versus a typical skilled hand laster’s fifty. The machine caught on very quickly. By 1889 demand for the shoe lasting machine was overwhelming. The Consolidated Lasting Machine Company was formed to manufacture the devices, and Matzeliger was given a large amount of stock in the organization. That year, at just 37 years of age, Matzeliger lost his life to tuberculosis. The United Shoe Machinery Company acquired Matzeliger’s patent and company stock Full Story
So thanks to Jan Matzeliger’s shoe “Lasting Machine” high quality shoes became affordable for everyone!! A Black Heritage postage stamp was issued in Matzeliger’s honor on September 15, 1991.
Here’s a link to another article from Black Inventor.com with some good pictures of the machine!
