Jan matzeliger biography invention ideas pdf

Matzeliger was born in Paramaribo the capital city of then Dutch Guyana, now Suriname on 15th September His father was a wealthy and well educated Dutch engineer of German descent living in Dutch Guyana and his mother was a Black Surinamese slave of African descent. At the age of ten, Matzeliger was apprenticed in the machine shops run by his father, where Matzeliger developed an interest in machinery and mechanics.

He had some interest in mechanics in his native country, but it was only after settling in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania at 19 after working as a sailor, Matzeliger, turned his interest of machinery and mechanics into a career once he began working in a machinery shop. 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.

It was thought that such intricate work could only be done by skilled, human hands. As a result, shoe lasters held great power over the shoe industry. After a while, he went to work in the Harney Brothers Shoes factory.

Asolitary black immigrant, he

At the time, no machine could attach the upper part of a shoe to the sole. After five years of work, Matzeliger obtained a patent for his invention in His machine could produce between to 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.

His early death in Lynn, Massachusetts from tuberculosis meant he never saw the full profit of his invention. He died at age 36 on August 24, Yet, because of the colour of his skin, he was not mentioned in the history books until recently.