December 4, 2024 • 33 mins
The shoes you’re wearing today likely were made possible by an invention from the late 19th century. But the inventor of that machine, who had little to no formal education, didn’t really get to enjoy the fruits of his labor.
Research:
· “29c Jan E. Matzeliger single.” Smithsonian National Postal Museum. https://postalmuseum.si.edu/object/npm_1993.2015.160
· Biography.com Editors. “Jan Matzeliger Biography.” Biography.com. June 24, 2020. https://www.biography.com/inventors/jan-matzeliger
· Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Jan Ernst Matzeliger". Encyclopedia Britannica, 11 Sep. 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jan-Ernst-Matzeliger.
· “Brockton lasters Strike.” The Daily Item. August 8, 1887. https://www.newspapers.com/image/945617821/?match=1&terms=lasters%20strike
· Curry, Sheree R. “Jan Ernst Matzeliger Made Modern Footwear Accessible.” USA Today. Feb. 17, 2023. https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2023/02/17/jan-ernst-matzeliger-black-shoe-inventor/11154017002/
· “Death of Earnest Matzeliger.” The Daily Item. Aug. 26, 1889. https://www.newspapers.com/image/945605665/?match=1&terms=Matzeliger
· “Jan Ernst Matzeliger.” National Inventors Hall of Fame. https://www.invent.org/inductees/jan-ernst-matzeliger
· “Jan Matzlieger ‘Lasting Machine.’” Massachusetts Institute of Technology. https://lemelson.mit.edu/resources/jan-matzlieger
· Kaplan, Sydney. “JAN EARNST MATZELIGER AND THE MAKING OF THE SHOE.” Journal of Negro History. Volume 40, Number 1. January 1955. https://doi.org/10.2307/2715446
· Matzeliger, J.E. “Lasting Machine.” U.S. Patent Office. March 20, 1883. https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/0274207
· “Matzeliger’s Invention Changed the World.” The Daily Item. Aug. 10, 1999. https://www.newspapers.com/image/948726215/?match=1&terms=Matzeliger
· Morgan, Stuart. “The birth of the lasting machine.” Satra. https://www.satra.com/bulletin/article.php?id=2501
· Smeulders, V. (2017, May 31). Matzeliger, Jan Ernst. Oxford African American Studies Center. Retrieved 25 Nov. 2024, from https://oxfordaasc.com/view/10.1093/acref/9780195301731.001.0001/acref-9780195301731-e-74508
· Thompson, Ross. “The Path to Mechanized Shoe Production in the United States.” University of North Carolina Press. 2001.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
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
(00:25):
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
(00:46):
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
(01:08):
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
(01:28):
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.
(01:51):
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
(02:12):
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,
(02:34):
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
(02:56):
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,
(03:17):
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
(03:38):
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,
(04:00):
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
(04:21):
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,
(04:44):
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,
(05:07):
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
(05:31):
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
(05:53):
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.
(06:13):
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
(06:33):
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
(06:56):
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
(07:20):
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
(07:42):
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.
(08:02):
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
(08:25):
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
(08:57):
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
(09:19):
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.
(09:44):
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
(10:05):
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
(10:25):
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
(10:49):
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
(11:10):
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
(11:32):
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
(11:55):
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
(12:15):
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
(12:37):
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
(12:58):
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
(13:20):
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
(13:43):
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.
(14:03):
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.
(14:24):
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.
(14:46):
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
(15:06):
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,
(15:29):
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
(15:50):
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
(16:12):
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
(16:34):
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,
(16:56):
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
(17:17):
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
(17:39):
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
(18:01):
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
(18:21):
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
(18:44):
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
(19:04):
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
(19:25):
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
(19:49):
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
(20:12):
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.
(20:32):
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
(20:53):
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,
(21:15):
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
(21:36):
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
(21:57):
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
(22:17):
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
(22:37):
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
(23:09):
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.
(23:31):
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
(23:51):
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
(24:13):
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
(24:34):
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
(24:55):
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.
(25:17):
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
(25:40):
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
(26:00):
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
(26:21):
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,
(26:43):
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
(27:03):
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,
(27:25):
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.
(27:47):
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,
(28:09):
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
(28:32):
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
(28:55):
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.
(29:17):
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
(29:40):
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
(30:01):
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
(30:24):
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
(30:45):
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
(31:05):
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
(31:26):
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
(31:48):
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
(32:08):
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
(32:30):
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.
(32:54):
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.
If you would like to write to us, you can
(33:16):
do so at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. You
can also subscribe to the show if you haven't done
that already. It's super duper easy on the iHeartRadio app
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
(33:36):
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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
(00:25):
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
(00:46):
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
(01:08):
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
(01:28):
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.
(01:51):
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
(02:12):
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,
(02:34):
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
(02:56):
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,
(03:17):
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
(03:38):
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,
(04:00):
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
(04:21):
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,
(04:44):
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,
(05:07):
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
(05:31):
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
(05:53):
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.
(06:13):
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
(06:33):
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
(06:56):
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
(07:20):
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
(07:42):
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.
(08:02):
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
(08:25):
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
(08:57):
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
(09:19):
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.
(09:44):
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
(10:05):
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
(10:25):
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
(10:49):
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
(11:10):
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
(11:32):
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
(11:55):
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
(12:15):
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
(12:37):
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
(12:58):
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
(13:20):
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
(13:43):
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.
(14:03):
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.
(14:24):
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.
(14:46):
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
(15:06):
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,
(15:29):
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
(15:50):
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
(16:12):
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
(16:34):
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,
(16:56):
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
(17:17):
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
(17:39):
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
(18:01):
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
(18:21):
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
(18:44):
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
(19:04):
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
(19:25):
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
(19:49):
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
(20:12):
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.
(20:32):
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
(20:53):
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,
(21:15):
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
(21:36):
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
(21:57):
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
(22:17):
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
(22:37):
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
(23:09):
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.
(23:31):
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
(23:51):
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
(24:13):
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
(24:34):
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
(24:55):
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.
(25:17):
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
(25:40):
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
(26:00):
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
(26:21):
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,
(26:43):
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
(27:03):
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,
(27:25):
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.
(27:47):
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,
(28:09):
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
(28:32):
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
(28:55):
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.
(29:17):
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
(29:40):
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
(30:01):
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
(30:24):
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
(30:45):
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
(31:05):
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
(31:26):
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
(31:48):
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
(32:08):
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
(32:30):
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.
(32:54):
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.
If you would like to write to us, you can
(33:16):
do so at History Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com. You
can also subscribe to the show if you haven't done
that already. It's super duper easy on the iHeartRadio app
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you
Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For
(33:36):
more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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