Jan Ernst Matzeliger

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. The shoes that you're wearing today likely were made possible by an invention from the late nineteenth century, unless you're wearing like ballet slippers or very fancy handmade shoes, right, or something that doesn't have like an upper and a soul, which I suppose is possible if you're a medieval reenactor, or there are other outlier cases. But the thing is, most of us are wearing shoes that are made possible by this inventor from the late nineteenth century. And that inventor of the machine that made that possible had little to no formal education, and he didn't really get to enjoy the fruits of his labor. And he's one of those people that unless you're a shoe person, you might not know about. So we're talking about jan Ernst Matzalaiger today. Jan Ernst Matzelager was born on September fifteenth, eighteen fifty two, in the city of Paramaribo in Dutch Guiana in South America. So today that is in Surinam, and this city is its capital. Jan's father was Dutch and his mother was a Serenemese black woman. Several but not all, sources note that his mother was enslaved to his father. Jan's father was in Dutch Guiana at the behest of the Dutch government. He was an engineer and his job there was to manage various business interests and especially factories controlled by the government that ran heavy machinery. Jan lived with an aunt on his father's side of the family, starting at age three. There are a lot of biographical sketches of Yon that say that he would occasionally make the rounds of factories with his father as a child, and that he was drawn to the various pieces of machinery he saw, which kind of makes it sound sort of idyllic. He was in those factories at a very young age, but the reality was that was because he was put to work at age ten apprenticing for a machinist. He is said to have shown a lot of intuitive engineering skill from a very young age, and he was able to repair machinery he wasn't all that familiar with with very little instruction. When he was nineteen, Jan left Dutch Guiana by getting work on an East India merchant ship. For two years, he worked on the ship and he traveled, but when he arrived in Philadelphia, he decided to stay there for a while. It's believed that he spent some time in Philadelphia as a cobbler before moving on to Boston, and then in eighteen seventy three, Mattzlagger arrived in Lynn, Massachusetts, where he would live for the rest of his life. When Matzlagger arrived in Lynn, it had a population of about thirty five thousand and it was one of the main places in the United States where shoes were made, so eventually he found work in a shoe factory. He worked in a number of roles in the factory, starting on a soul sewing machine and then a heel burnisher, and then eventually onto a buttonhole machine, probably others as well, and to supplement his factory income, he also drove a coach. During those early years in the United States, Yan had to learn English and to recognize the restrictions that racism placed on his movements. One story from his time early on is that he tried to go to a church, but he was turned away from that church because he was black. He did eventually find a church, which was the North Congregational Church, and a community there in their Christian Endeavor Society, which was a youth group. Yeah, that church became very important to his life. In addition to driving a coach in his off hours, Yon also started formally studying English at evening classes several nights a week, and with these structured lessons, he soon progressed really quickly. And it said that he not only learned to read and speak English, but that when he spoke, he had no perceivable accent. And as his English improved, he became more and more involved in his church. He started teaching Sunday school and serving on various committees, and he also settled into life in the Greater Lynn community, and he soon built up this reputation as a gentleman with a very keen wit and a lot of kindness for others. Once Jan was proficient in English, he kept working to expand his education. He started acquiring all kinds of books, particularly scientific works. He learned about natural sciences and physics, and soon he started tinkering with various inventions. It's possible that some of these were successful and were eventually patented, but those patents would have been held by Matzlagger's employers. They helped him pay for the supplies that he needed. Y. Yeah, there's a lot of variation on what you will find in terms of what people think he invented during that time, which surely I did not include them because it's all speculation. But whatever he may have done in his early inventiveness, it was his work in shoe manufacturing that was the most important. And this reveals an interesting state in the manufacture of shoes that had been the case for a very long time. There were mechanized processes for just about every step of shoe manufacture by the mid nineteenth century, with the exception of the step known as lasting. So lasting is the stage of construction when the stitch together and more or less completed upper is shaped into its final form and then joined to the soul. And in the early half of the nineteenth centuries, machines had been developed they could handle literally all of the other steps, and Mattzalager was familiar with all of those machines because he worked on most, if not all, of the available ones of the factory. But no one had been able to mechanize lasting. There are some good reasons for that. You may have heard the term shoe last as a noun. That's the form often made of wood that is made to mimic the shape of a human foot, and it's what the finished upper is stretched over and formed on so that when you put the shoe on, it fits correctly. Lasts are still part of shoe manufacture. If you've ever wondered why some brands of shoes usually fit you better than other ones, it's because different companies use different lasts. With all the variations in foot shapes that humans have, some of them will match up to any given person's foot better than the others. This is also why sometimes a shoe you've been wearing for years can betray you because a new last has been selected to form an on right. If you buy the newest model, it may not be the same last as the old one, just as in a side that like. You can still have custom shoes made with a custom last sure where they will cast your foot and you get shoes that are made specifically just for you. And there was a lot of that going on in the nineteenth century when Mattzlagger was working, but he was focused on the industrial production of shoes. So in the eighteen seventies, when mattz Lagger started working in these shoe factories, skilled cobblers were still the ones to fit the upper of a shoe over the last, carefully shape it to that form, and then attach it to the sole with nails. And that human finishing was kind of a necessity because leather, which is what the vast majority of shoes were made from, has natural variables in it. Even two cuts of leather taken from the exact same animal hide and treated with the exact same processes might have different thicknesses, or may have different tendencies in different spots when it to stretch in flexibility. In addition to the careful shaping that had to be done taking these variables into account, the right and left shoe had to match perfectly, and they had to be perfectly joined to the soul. So there were plenty of people in the industry who really believed that there would always have to be a pair of human hands doing the finishing on shoes. But this also created a workflow problem because when all of those other parts of the process were mechanized, but the finish wasn't, that meant that shoe pieces would kind of pile up, and you had this bottleneck unless you had just a huge team of people who had the skill to handle lasting. We will talk about how manufacturers were trying to address this issue after we pause for a sponsor break. There were plenty of people trying to come up with a machine that could last shoe but there just wasn't anything working. By the time Matt Selager was in the industry, they had been trying for decades and the best that had come of it were kind of near misses or machines that could sort of do the job, but they weren't much faster than a manual finish, so there wasn't really a lot of impetus to adopt them. Gordon McKay, who was a businessman responsible for many of the machines in the industry, attempted to corner the lasting market by purchasing just about all of the existing patents that people had filed for various parts of it and kind of throwing a load of money at research and development. He was also very very ligitious with any competitors, but that wasn't really worth it, because while his efforts did eventually produce a lasting machine. It was only able to handle certain types of shoes, and the results even within that set of certain types of shoes were not consistent. And as these mechanization efforts were underway, the lasters in the industry unionized in eighteen eighty, and they were able to force the companies they worked for to give them significant pay increases because it had become deeply apparent that without them the whole system would fall apart. This unionization only spurred manufacturers to want a lasting machine so they could step around the last's union and its relatively high weekly salary arrangement. We say relatively because they were being paid what they deserved, but compared to other people in the industry, they were getting more. As Massachusetts and specifically Lynn were an epicenter of the shoe industry, Yon Matzalager had a front row seat to all of this playing out, and he thought that perhaps he could make a machine that could finish shoes. He started working through ideas for such a machine in the evenings when he wasn't working either of his jobs or seeing to any of his charch activities. He had to study mechanical engineering to even know where to start, and he acquired a set of drafting tools secondhand to start making diagrams. He didn't try to build on the previous efforts of other engineers because those were not working. Instead, he started by making a study of the people who were lasting shoes by hand. He observed them whenever he could and made detailed notes about how their hands moved through each step of the process. Six months later he had produced his first prototype. And this effort at making a prototype was really a case of making do with what he had on hand, because Mattzelager did not have much money, so he used discarded goods and made his prototype out of things like cigar boxes and wire offcuts that had been thrown away so that he could put it together. But this was really just a proof of concept. It was not intended to be a working piece of machinery. He just wanted to see if he had gotten the motions right before he attempted to build an iron version of his mechanism. Initially, he was as with his proof of com gathering cast off materials to try to make that iron version work. But then he had a stroke of luck when he was hired as a maintenance machinist for one of Lynn's Shoe manufacturers, and he was allowed to claim a small workspace in the plant there where he could work on his personal project and had access to some better materials. So there's some incongruity in the accounts in terms of whether people knew what he was up to, because we don't really have his own account. So these are secondhand versions that are often intended to frame the story in a particular way. Usually they involve people mocking him or secretly thinking he was a genius. One thing that's universally recognized was that Jon Matzlagger was driven in pursuit of this invention. Two women who worked with them at the factory realized that he was skipping meals to work on his project in this little space that he was in, and they started sharing their meals with him. He worked on getting this right for four years. Yeah, those two women became very good friends of his. He attended their weddings. They were like his work buddies, and they all took care of each other and it's very very sweet. But once he had a functioning model, Matzelager realized that he still needed money. The machine was more or less built, but there were other steps in the process that were going to need capital, like running tests with the machine and filing for a patent, and he reached out to potential investors, but most of them just wanted to purchase his ideas, or in some cases they wanted to purchase just parts of his machine, and he was not interested in either of those outcomes. Eventually, he did find financing in the form of a business partnership. Two men, Charles H. Delnow and Melville C. Nichols, offered to finance and start a company with Mattzlager in exchange for a three way split of the profits. Thanks to their investment, Yan was able to complete his patent application. The patent application was submitted January twenty fourth, eighteen eighty two, and it read, in part quote, heretofore devices have been contrived for performing a part of the operation, such as holding the last in proper position and drawing the leather over the last, while the nailing was done by hand. In my machine, I perform all the operations by the machine and automatically, requiring only the service of a boy or girl or unskilled labor to attend the machine. My invention includes a mechanism for holding the last in place and allowing it to be turned and the last fed forward in proper position for the operation of the machine. It includes a feeding device for moving the last step by step at a proper distance, whereby the mechanism for drawing over the leather may operate successfully and at proper intervals. It includes pincher or gripping mechanism for drawing the upper over the last, mechanism for turning the gripping mechanism in order to plat the leather at the heel or toe, mechanism for holding the last in proper position for the operation of the feeding mechanism, mechanism for feeding the nails and holding them in proper position to be driven, and mechanism for driving the nails at the proper instant. The details of construction are all fully set forth here and after, and together with the principles of my invention, are stated in the claims, so in case that slightly stilted language is unclear, the machine could pull the leather down over a last, plead it at the toe to fit around the last, and then it would grip the last with the leather upper on it while positioning it over the sole nail. The two of them together and then eject the shoe completed. But when he submitted this patent application in his documentation, it said that it kind of stumped officials at the US Patent Office. There wasn't anything wrong with the paperwork. It was just unique enough and complex enough that a patent official had to be sent to Lynn to inspect the machine himself to make sure he knew what Mattzalaiger had created before he approved it for a patent. So that excerpt that I made poor Tracy just read includes a lot of steps for one machine. So it may have seemed a bit unreal to patent experts. And that's particularly so when you consider that up to this point, the majority of people were like, no one is ever going to be able to invent a machine that does this. So this visit though to Lynn must have done the trick, because on March twentieth, eighteen eighty three, Mattzaliger received a patent for his invention. When I read this, I had a moment where I was like, this seems like more more effort to get the patents approved than a lot of the patents we have talked about. Yes, for sure, they were just like I'm sorry, what sir, Yeah. Next, there had to be factory tests to make sure that the machine laster worked. It took two years after the patent was granted for Matzlager to build a second model that would be ready for these kinds of tests, But at the end of May of eighteen eighty five, Mattzlager's invention was put through its paces. It turned out seventy five perfectly finished pairs of shoes. After the success, things moved very quickly, so quickly, in fact, that it gets hard to track the business deals that were made in the wake of this success. Beyond and his partners had formed a company, but they needed bigger investors so they could produce the machines at the scale that was needed to meet this instant market interest. Soon George W. Brown and Sydney W. Winslow were partners and the company was reorganized as the Consolidated Lasting Machine Company. Consolidated as a business owned the rights to Matzalauger's patent, and Matzelagger got a large chunk of the company stock. Consolidated Lasting Machine Company got up and running with the staff of two hundred and twenty five workers to build Lasting machines and very quickly demand to outpace their output, as is pretty common whenever there's a revolutionary invention, and Matzeliger's laster definitely was that. There were imitations. Many inventors sought to replicate the consolidated lasting machine, but nobody was really able to. One of the things that no one else seemed to ever get right was creating a machine that could complete all of the steps that Mattzaligers did while still handling the leather with care. Many of the imitation machines lost product due to tears and punctures in the material. At a time when the average number of pairs of shoes produced by an artisan laster working by hand was about fifty in a day, one of Matt's Laige's machines, working at its slowest, could make one hundred and fifty. That number was dependent on the style of the shoe and how fancy or intricate its design was. For simpler shoes, the machine could make as many as seven hundred pairs in a day, But of course this was not good news for the people who had been making their living as hand lasters. The rapid adoption of this machine by shoe manufacturers meant that there needed to be people to run them, and there was even a school set up by the consolidated Lasting Machine Company to train people. Many of the people that went through that training had been hand lasters, but you'll recall that mattz Lager's patent language specifically noted that a boy or a girl or an unskilled laborer could handle running the machine. That meant the factories felt like the wages for Lasting Machine operators could be a lot lower than what the lasters had been making when they were doing all that work by hand. The lasters were not against the use of Matzealiger's machine for those who transitioned from hand lasting to operating them. They recognized that their job was less strenuous, but they were against the way that it was being used to justify a reduction of their wages. In the middle of eighteen eighty seven, one factory W. L. Douglas Company had a strike. The lasters wanted an advance paid on the work they were doing, and they wanted an agreement in place that only union members would run the Lasting machines. This strike was reported in the Daily Item, which is the local paper for Lynn, on August eighth. It reads, quote the forty lasters employed at the factory of W. L. Douglas in Brockton quit work Saturday morning because of the disagreement between the lasters union and mister Douglas regarding the prices, and also because of two non union men being employed on the Lasting machines. Mister Douglas said that morning that the trouble was caused by the Lasting machines, which he had recently put into his factory. He said that last Monday he brought up from Plymouth two men to work on the machines, as he intended to put one half union and the other half non union men on the machines. The men were paid two dollars and fifty cents a day, which is about the same price they received for hand lasting. Mister Douglas states that he does not intend to allow the union to control the machines so as this write up continues, though, it reports that Douglas was actually planning to use only non union men going forward on the Lasting machines, but that he will still give handwork to anyone who wants it. That article states quote, all lasters who wish to return to work on Monday will be given employment, and all who do not return will consider themselves discharged. Those who do not return will never be employed again by him. Of course, if they came in, they would be paid at a lower rate. Though this was the first of several lasters strike in Lin and beyond, the messaging of the lasters Union always made clear that they weren't anti mechanization, They just wanted fair wages, and in a refreshing turn of events, they actually got them. The union managed to negotiate for the laster's pay to move back up to where it had been before the Lasting machine came into the factories, and for the machines to be run only by union members. Maybe even more surprising is that Yon Matzalager was never the target in any of these conflicts, and once the lasters were back at the factories running the machines, a lot of them noted that they were quite happy running them. Yeah, it was a lot less backbreaking than hunching over a pair of shoes and having to do that fifty times a day. In a moment, we're going to talk about what Yon Matzalaiger was up to while the Laster's Union and the factories were figuring out their conflict. But first, we will hear from the sponsors that keep the show going. While the strikes and union negotiations were playing out, Matzelager was still busy perfecting new iterations of the machine and coming up with completely new ideas. He became very interested in motors and perpetual motion machines. But though his curiosity and ingenuity were still running at full tilt, his health was failing. He had first come down with a cold in eighteen eighty six, but that cold never seemed to go away. He kept working through it, but he also just kept getting worse, and what he had thought was a persistent cold was eventually diagnosed as tuberculosis. Things progressed to a point that it really wasn't even feasible for Yan to live by himself. He had become really weak and eventually was too ill to even leave the house. He depended on his friends to take care of him, and he also took care of them. In a return. He purchased a home for his friends, mister and Missus William Lewis, and he lived there with them in his final years. Although he really couldn't get out of the house, he was not living in isolation. Through his church and his friendly demeanor, Matzlagger had built up a devoted community of friends, and people were always stopping by the house to visit and see what he had been working on. Outside of engineering and machinery, Yan's other interest was painting. He had taken it up early in his life, and he had gifted friends some of his work over the years, But as he became weaker and weaker and unable to do as much work with his machinery, he continued to paint, including painting landscapes of Dutch Guiana as he remembered it from his childhood. In the spring of eighteen eighty nine, Jon Matslagger made out his will. He was hospitalized in August of that year, and he died on August twenty fourth. Was only thirty seven years old, and while he had completely changed an entire industry, he had not really gotten to see the impact of his work. His obituary in the Linn Paper read, in part quote, he was an exemplary, big hearted young man and had many friends in this city. The lasting machine he worked so hard to perfect has much merit to it, and there are many of them in use. The money that Yan had made through his business dealings was left to the community that had cared for him right from his arrival in Lynn. He left the North Congregational Church all of his interests in the Union Lasting Machine Company and one third of his stock in Consolidated Lasting, and the church held onto that stock for decades. He wanted the money the church made from that second batch the Consolidated Lasting Company stock to provide for Lynn's poor community, regardless of their religious affiliation. He also left specific financial and material gifts, include his extensive library for several of the young people in his life, with provisions to pay for their education. He also left stock to the medical professionals who had cared for him in his prolonged illness, and he left the rest of his business holdings to fifteen of his closest friends. He left a handful of personal effects and paintings to his friends as well. Although Yan had died, his invention lived on. Almost immediately after his passing. New engineers were assigned by Consolidated Lasting to finish the work he had been doing on a fourth version of a Lasting machine. Consolidated Lasting used Matz Lagger's patents to corner the market on machine lasting, and they also acquired a lot of those shoe manufacturing companies in Massachusetts and around the Northeast, including the company that made the first shoemaking machine that Mattzlager had trained on. That was the McKay Copeland Company. McKay had spent a great deal of money in the years prior to Mattzlager's lasting machine, buying up patents that seemed like promising steps toward totally mechanized shoe manufacture, and he remained an important player in the industry. The men whom Jan had partnered with in the early days of production all got just ridiculously rich thanks to his ingenuity. United Shoe Machine Corporation, which built the machines that were then sent to factories, had a massive growth spurt in eighteen ninety nine, having absorbed forty one smaller facilities in the course of just a few years. Sidney Winslow, one of Jan's partners you may remember from earlier, became the president of that company, and he was soon regarded as the King of shoe machinery. One of the many men to benefit from Mattzalauger's invention, Gordon McKay, who he just mentioned, founded a school for black boys in Rhode Island as a way to honor Yan who had never had any formal schooling beyond a little bit of elementary school. As noted by biographer Sidney Kaplan in the Journal of Negro History in nineteen fifty five, quote what Mattzelagger did for his country and for humanity, however, can hardly be measured in a quantity of dollars, For his invention has gone down in history as one of those fundamental contributions. Then, the long run, will have made work easier for men and women by producing more swiftly and efficiently a basic article of human need. He had created something that had made quality footwear available to a much larger portion of the public by creating a machine that was so efficient that it increased production to a massive degree and also drove down the cost of shoes. By the beginning of the twentieth century, there were two hundred and thirty shoe factories in Linn and in the surrounding area, and they were churning out a million pairs of shoes every day. The industry's income reportedly in increased by three hundred and fifty percent as a direct result of the lasting machine's introduction, the inventor received a lot of posthumous accolades. In nineteen oh one, Jan Matzlager was honored at the Pan American Exposition held in Buffalo, New York. He was again posthumously given a gold medal and he was given an honorary diploma in recognition of his achievements and his commitment to his self directed education. On September fifteenth, nineteen ninety one, a twenty nine cent postage stamp was issued that featured Matts Lagger. It was part of the Black Heritage stamp series and the stamp portrait, designed by Barbara Higgins Bond, features Matts Lagger in the foreground with diagrams from his Lasting Machine patent in the background. And then recently, in autumn of twenty twenty three, a shoe brand called Gems by Pencol launched. It was founded by doctor d Wayne Edwards, who has designed footwear for huge brands over the years. You are a sneakerhead. You know his name, but the name of his company, Gems, is a nod to Jan Ernst Mattzealiger. That j Em is his initials, and that's Jan Mattzaliger who I'm personally thankful for because I love shoes. Okay, do you have listener mail for us? I do. I have two pieces because they're brief. The first is from our listener Scott, who writes, Dear Holly and Tracy. On my visit to the Boston MFA today, I stopped by to see Patrick Lyon at the Forge photo attached for proof. So he went to see the portrait that Patrick Lyon had made of himself, which he did not want to portray him as a fancy rich man. And then Scott also attached to pet tacks of his pug, Clementine, who is redonka doodle in the best way. Clementine looks like a gun to plush. So when I when I read this email, I was scrolling down and I was like, oh, you know, I think I've probably seen that painting in the MFA, because I have been to the MFA a number of times. And then as I kept scrolling, even though I had read the email and I knew it was coming, I had a moment where I was like, why are there dog toys on the floor at the MFA? Because picture number two was not taken at the MFA. Correct, but they do the way they line up in our email, they make it look like it's like one heuge super immach. The other email that I want to note is from our listener Rob. It has a little bit of a time limit on it, so I'm hoping that this can benefit some of our listeners. Rob writes, I have no idea if either of you will be anywhere near New York City in the next month, but I just learned there is an off Broadway show about Artemisia Gentileski playing at fifty nine E fifty nine. Since I learned about her from you two, I feel obligated to bring it to your attention. There's also an interview that he links us to with the author and co star Kate Hamill on Friday's episode of the Today on Broadway podcast. This email was written on November sixteenth, so I think when this episode comes out there will still be time to see it. Rob also writes, I hope you are enjoying the fall dessert season. I have modified my Pumpkin crack slash Pumpkin dump Cake dessert that you feature two years ago to be friendlier to diabetics, as I am now among their number who knew there is now sugar free yellow cake mix. Between that and Stevia Baking Blend, I can still take part in small portions. Rob I wanted to read this one because if any of our listeners are near there and want to check that play out, that sounds amazing. And two just to say I feel you, not me, but my beloved has been dealing with the new world of having to really be careful about sugar, insulin, etc. So I'm glad that you found ways to adapt. I also think it's just a good reminder to people. This is PSA. If you can manage it, please get your regular health screenings, because you can catch those things early before they've become a problem. I know that's not easy for everybody, but if you have access, please do it. It's just good for you and we want you around forever. 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