Jan Matzeliger, American Inventor

Jan Matzeliger, American Inventor

Jan Ernst Matzeliger (September 15, 1852 - August 24, 1889) was an African-American inventor in the shoe industry. In the early days of shoe making, shoes were made mainly by hand. Since the greatest difficulty in shoe making was the actual assembly of the soles to the upper shoe, it required great skill to tack and sew the two components together. At the time, no machine could attach the upper part of a shoe to the sole. This had to be done manually by a "hand laster"; a skilled one could produce 50 pairs in a 10 hour day. After five years of work, Matzeliger obtained a patent for his invention in 1883. His machine could produce between 150 to 700 pairs of shoes a day, cutting shoe prices across the nation in half. He sacrificed his health working exhausting hours on his invention and not eating over long periods of time, he caught a cold which quickly developed into tuberculosis. He died in 1889, at the age of 36, never seeing the full profit of his invention.

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