aken for this stage of production as well as the cost involved. It took Matzeliger several years of experimentation with scrap material until he had designed a machine for the purpose. By 1880, he had built a model of his lasting machine from wooden cigar boxes, elastic and wire.
The next step
Once his crude model worked, Matzeliger turned his attention to building a prototype. Realising that this would require sufficient working space and access to machine tools, he persuaded local shoemakers Beal Brothers to give him a job, a secure working area where he could work on his project and permission to use the company’s machine tools. Matzeliger is said to have searched through junkyards and factory dumps in order to find usable parts from broken machinery and altering them to fit his requirements. Two years later, his working machine was finished.
Although at an early stage of development, Matzeliger’s invention was capable of pleating the leather around the toe of a last. He filed for a patent on January 24th 1882, but the detail on his 15 pages of text and drawings was so complex, that a United States Patent and Trademark Office inspector had to visit him to have the workings of his machine explained. On March 20th 1883, Jan Matzeliger received the patent for his lasting machine, which took hold of an upper by means of pincers, pulled it over the last, held it in place and pinned the leather to the last. Instead of the 60 pairs a day achieved by a really good hand laster, Matzeliger’s machine could help to produce up to 700 pairs daily.
The story was by no means over. It took Matzeliger another three years to build a machine he felt was ready for the footwear industry. During this time, he made a number of engineering improvements that warranted a second patent, and the Matzeliger lasting machine was finally ready for its first demonstration on May 29th 1885. A worker placed an insole and an upper on a last and positioned this combination on the machine. When operating, the machine drove in a tack, turned the shoe, pleated the leather, drove in another tack, and continued until the shoe was finished. This exactly reproduced the technique used by hand lasters, but only took one minute to complete.
Matzeliger attracted two investors, reaching a deal in which he transferred two-thirds of any profits from sales of his machine to Melville Nichols and Charles Delnow, who formed a company to market this new creation. Towards the end of the decade, Matzeliger’s patent was sold to the Consolidated McKay Lasting Machine Company. This organisation grew quickly and, with demand for the lasting machine proving substantial, it soon merged with several other shoe machine manufacturers to form the United Shoe Machinery Company.
Sadly, perhaps having exhausted himself with his obsessive desire to design a machine to finally automate the one remaining footwear manufacturing process, Jan Matzeliger died at just 36 years of age in 1889, from tuberculosis.
Matzeliger’s machine is described as transforming an industry, building a great corporation and producing several millionaires – although he was not one of them. By the start of the 20th century, the city of Lynn had become a major centre for footwear production, with more than 230 factories manufacturing over a million pairs of shoes each day. This success was in no small part as a result of Jan Matzeliger’s invention of the lasting machine, and today virtually all mass-produced shoes are lasted by machine. To mark this young man’s legacy, a 29 cent US postal stamp was issued in 1991 in Matzeliger’s honour.
This article was originally published on page 38 of the May 2020 issue of SATRA Bulletin.