Inventor of the Lasting Shoe Maker Machine ------ Mr Jan Ernst Matzeliger (1852-1889)

Jan Ernst Matzeliger 

(September 15, 1852 – August 24, 1889)

He was an inventor whose lasting machine brought significant change to the manufacturing of shoes.
Matzeliger was born on a coffee plantation in Dutch Guiana, now Suriname. 

His father, Ernst Matzeliger, was a third generation Dutchman of German descent living in the Dutch Guiana capital city of Paramaribo. He owned and operated the Colonial Shipworks that had been in his family for three generations.

 His mother was a house slave of African descent; she lived on the plantation of which his father was the owner for a time. At the age of ten, Jan Matzeliger was apprenticed in the Colonial Ship Works in Paramaribo, where he demonstrated a natural aptitude for machinery and mechanics.

He left Dutch Guiana at age 19, and worked as a mechanic on a Dutch East Indies merchant ship for several years before settling in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where he first learned the shoe trade.