Matzeliger, Jan Earnst

By: Kenneth R. Manning

Source:

 Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

Matzeliger, Jan Earnst

1852–1889
African American inventor.

Jan Earnst Matzeliger was born in Paramaribo, Suriname (Dutch Guiana), the son of Carl Matzeliger, a Dutch engineer in charge of government machine works for the colony, and a native Surinamese mother. At the age of ten, Matzeliger began serving an apprenticeship in the machine works. In 1871 he signed on to the crew of an East Indian merchant ship and set out to seek his fortune overseas. After a two-year voyage, he landed at Philadelphia, where he probably worked as a cobbler. In 1877 he settled in the town of Lynn, Massachusetts, the largest shoe-manufacturing center in the United States. His first job there was with the M. H. Harney Company, where he operated a McKay sole-stitching machine. He also gained experience in heel-burnishing, buttonholing, machine repair, and other aspects of shoe manufacture. Later, he was employed in the shoe factory of Beal Brothers. In his spare time Matzeliger drove a coach, studied to increase his proficiency in the English language, and painted oils and watercolors (mostly landscape scenes). After covering rent and other essentials, his small earnings went into the purchase of books, including such useful reference tools as Popular Educator and Science for All.

At the time, a major challenge facing the shoe industry was how to improve the technique of “lasting”—or connecting the upper flaps to the soles of the shoe. Lasting was still done entirely by hand, an arduous process that slowed production. Several lasting machines had been tried without success. With characteristic zeal, Matzeliger took up this challenge, which had eluded the best mechanical minds. He spent long evening hours in his garret room experimenting and building models. In March 1883 he finally received Patent No. 274,207 for his “Lasting Machine.” With sole and upper positioned on a lath, the machine alternately drove tacks, rotated the shoe, and pleated the leather—an automated replication of the manual technique. Two years later he ran a successful factory test in which, over the course of a day, his machine lasted a record seventy-five pairs of shoes (a hand laster could produce no more than fifty in a ten-hour period). With further improvements, it lasted up to 700 pairs a day. This invention, dubbed the “niggerhead,” came into universal use in the shoe industry. (It is unclear how the machine acquired its name. The term niggerhead, applied in several contexts at the time, was used in the apparel industry to designate a type of fabric.)

Matzeliger's “dark complexion” made him stand out among his mostly white fellow workers, and his reception by the community varied. A religious man, he tried without success to join the local Unitarian, Episcopal, and Catholic churches. In 1884 he was accepted into the Christian Endeavor Society, the youth wing of the North Congregational Church. He was active in the society's Sunday school and fund-raising work. His diligence, polite bearing, and easygoing personality endeared him to those whose minds had not been completely closed by racial prejudice. Among his circle of friends were the younger group of factory workers and members of the Christian Endeavor Society. He never married.

Although he remained active in the developing shoe machinery technology and was awarded four related patents between 1888 and 1891, Matzeliger's financial benefit from the work was relatively modest. He sold the patents to his backers for $15,000 worth of stock in their company. By the end of the century, this company had become part of the United Shoe Machinery Corporation. Matzeliger's patents provided a nucleus of economic strength for the corporation in its early years. Matzeliger was long since gone, however, having died of tuberculosis. At the time of his death he was being cared for by friends at his home in Lynn. Three of his five patents were granted posthumously.

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