Jan Ernst Matzeliger
The son of an enslaved woman who arrived in America with little English and mechanised the making of shoes
Jan Matzeliger was born in 1852 in Paramaribo, in the Dutch colony of Surinam. His father was a Dutch engineer who ran the colonial shipworks; his mother was an enslaved woman of African descent. At ten he was apprenticed in the shipworks and showed a gift for machinery. At nineteen he went to sea as a mechanic on a merchant ship and in 1873 landed in Philadelphia, speaking Dutch and almost no English.
He drifted into the shoe trade and in 1877 moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, the centre of the industry. Machines by then cut and stitched shoes, but the final step, lasting, in which the upper is stretched over a foot-shaped last and tacked to the sole, was done by hand. The hand lasters were the aristocrats of the factory, could do about fifty pairs a day, and were sure no machine would ever copy their fingers.
Matzeliger studied English at night, took drawing lessons, and began to build. His first model was made of cigar boxes, wood and wire. He refused offers to buy it and kept improving it for years while working by day, living on almost nothing. His patent was granted in 1883, and the machine could last several hundred pairs a day. Shoe prices in America roughly halved. He had to sell shares in the invention to finance it and saw little of the money it made.
He caught tuberculosis, weakened by years of overwork, and died in Lynn in 1889, aged 36, leaving his shares to the church that had welcomed him when others would not.