How Did Jan Matzeliger Change The Shoemaking Industry In The 1800s?

Jan Matzeliger was an inventor of Surinamese and Dutch descent best known for patenting the shoe lasting machine, which fabricated footwear more affordable.

Who Was Jan Matzeliger?

Jan Matzeliger settled in the United States in 1873 and trained as a shoemaker. In 1883, he patented a shoe lasting machine that increased the availability of shoes and decreased the price of footwear. He died of tuberculosis on August 24, 1889.

Early Life

January Ernst Matzeliger was built-in on September fifteen, 1852, in Paramaribo, Suriname —known at the time every bit Dutch Guiana. Matzeliger's father was a Dutch engineer, and his mother was Surinamese. Showing mechanical aptitude at a young age, Matzeliger began working in machine shops supervised by his father at the age of 10. At 19, he left Suriname to encounter the earth as a sailor on an East Indian merchant ship. In 1873, he settled in Philadelphia.

Invention of the Lasting Machine

After settling in the U.s., Matzeliger worked for several years to learn English. Equally a dark-skinned human being, his professional options were limited, and he struggled to make a living in Philadelphia. In 1877, Matzeliger moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, to seek work in the boondocks's chop-chop growing shoe industry. He found a position every bit an apprentice in a shoe mill. Matzeliger learned the cordwaining merchandise, which involved crafting shoes almost entirely by hand.

Cordwainers made molds of customers' anxiety, called "lasts," with wood or stone. The shoes were then sized and shaped co-ordinate to the molds. The process of shaping and attaching the body of the shoe to its sole was done entirely by hand with "paw lasters." This was considered the almost difficult and time-consuming stage of assembly. Since the last step in the process was mechanized, the lack of mechanization of the penultimate stage, the lasting, created a meaning bottleneck.

Matzeliger set out to observe a solution to the problems he discerned in the shoemaking process. 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. Subsequently experimenting with several models, he applied for a patent on a "lasting machine."

On March 20, 1883, Matzeliger received patent number 274,207 for his motorcar. The mechanism held a shoe on a last, pulled the leather downwardly around the heel, gear up and drove in the nails, and then discharged the completed shoe. It had the capacity to produce 700 pairs of shoes a day—more than ten times the corporeality typically produced by man hands.

Matzeliger's lasting machine was an immediate success. In 1889, the Consolidated Lasting Machine Visitor was formed to industry the devices, with Matzelinger receiving a big amount of stock in the arrangement. After Matzeliger's expiry, the United Shoe Machinery Company acquired his patent.

Decease and Legacy

Matzeliger's shoe lasting car increased shoe product tremendously. The upshot was the employment of more unskilled workers and the proliferation of low-cost, loftier-quality footwear for people around the world. Unfortunately, Matzeliger was able to enjoy his success for merely a short fourth dimension. He contracted tuberculosis in 1886 and died on August 24, 1889, at the historic period of 37, in Lynn. In 1991, the United States government issued a "Blackness Heritage" stamp postage in Matzeliger'southward award.