Jan Ernst Matzeliger (September 15, 1852 – August 24, 1889)
From Dutch Guiana, now called Suriname. Father was a dutch slave owner who also owned and operated the colonial shipworks. Mother was a house slave on the father’s plantation.
He left Dutch Guiana at age 19, and worked as a mechanic on a Dutch East Indies merchant ship for several years before settling in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he first learned the shoe trade. By 1877, he spoke adequate English (Dutch was his native tongue) and moved to Massachusetts to pursue his interest in the shoe industry. He eventually went to work in the Harney Brothers Shoe factory. In the early days of shoemaking, shoes were made mainly by hand. For proper fit, the customer's feet had to be duplicated in size and form by creating a stone or wooden mold called a "last" from which the shoes were sized and shaped. Since the greatest difficulty in shoemaking was the actual assembly of the soles to the upper shoe, it required great skill to tack and sew the two components together. It was thought that such intricate work could only be done by skilled human hands.
After five years of work, Matzeliger obtained a patent for his invention of an automated shoe laster in 1883.[2] A skilled hand laster could produce 50 pairs in a ten-hour day.[3] Matzeliger's machine could produce between 150 and 700 pairs of shoes a day, cutting shoe prices across the nation in half.[2]Matzeliger's invention was perhaps "the most important invention for New England." His invention was "the greatest forward step in the shoe industry," according to the church bulletin of The First Church of Christ (the same church that took him as a member) as part of a commemoration held in 1967 in his honor. Yet, because of the color of his skin, he was not mentioned in the history books until recently.[1][4]
He also held these patents:
274,207, 3/20/1883, Automatic method for lasting shoe[9]
421,954, 2/25/1890, Nailing machine
423,937, 3/25/1890, Tack separating and distributing mechanism
459,899, 9/22/1891, Lasting machine
415,726, 11/26/1899, Mechanism for distributing tacks, nails, etc.
With the psychological and emotional trauma of being a product of slavery, Jan still added value wherever he worked. Not letting his past or humble beginnings dictate his future and contributions. Through the insults of being called the Dutch nigger and his invention being called the niggerhead laster, his inventions revolutionized the shoe industry and construction with his nailing machine invention.
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