Jan Ernst Matzeliger

Jan Ernst Matzeliger was born in Paramaribo, in what was then Dutch Guiana, to a Dutch engineer father who ran the Colonial Shipworks and a mother of African descent. At age ten he was apprenticed in his father's machine shop, where he developed an early feel for mechanics. At nineteen he left home to work as a sailor on a Dutch East Indies merchant ship, eventually settling in Philadelphia before moving to Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1877 — then the centre of the American shoe manufacturing industry.

Arriving with almost no English, Matzeliger took an apprenticeship in a shoe factory, where he became fascinated by 'lasting' — the painstaking hand process of stretching leather over a wooden last and stitching it to the sole, which even the fastest workers could only do 50 pairs a day. Working nights and using whatever materials he could find — cigar boxes, scrap wire, discarded wood, and paper — he spent roughly five years building a working model of a machine that could do it automatically.

The design was so intricate that when he submitted it to the US Patent Office, officials could not decipher the diagrams from paper alone and sent a representative to Lynn to see the machine in person. On 20 March 1883 he was granted patent no. 274,207 for the 'Lasting Machine.' Investors Charles H. Delnow and Melville S. Nichols provided the capital to finish it, in exchange for two-thirds ownership; Matzeliger kept the remaining third and was later given a large stake in the Consolidated Lasting Machine Company formed around his invention.

The finished machine could produce a shoe in about a minute — up to 700 pairs a day versus 50 by hand — and its impact on the industry was immediate: shoe prices fell by roughly half nationwide, and Lynn, Massachusetts became known as 'the shoe capital of the world.' Rejected by several churches in Lynn because of his race, Matzeliger found community at the North Congregational Church, where he taught Sunday school. He continued refining his invention and received three further patents, but the long hours and self-neglect took a toll: he fell ill with what he thought was a cold in 1886, which developed into tuberculosis. He died in Lynn on 24 August 1889, one month short of his 37th birthday, before he could see the full impact of his work.