Matzeliger was born in
Dutch Guiana, now
Suriname. His father, Ernst Carel Matzeliger Jr. (1823–1864), was a third-generation Dutchman of
German descent living in the Dutch Guiana capital city of Paramaribo. Ernst owned and operated the Colonial Shipworks that had been in his family for three generations. His mother was a house slave of African descent who lived on the plantation owned by his father for a time. At age ten, Matzeliger was apprenticed in the Colonial Shipworks in
Paramaribo, where he demonstrated a natural aptitude for machinery and mechanics. Matzeliger left Dutch Guiana at nineteen 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. By 1877, he spoke adequate English (Dutch was his native tongue) and moved to Massachusetts to pursue his interest in the shoe industry. He eventually went to work at the Harney Brothers Shoe factory. Matzeliger obtained a patent for his invention of an automated shoe-lasting machine in 1883. A skilled hand laster could produce fifty pairs of shoes in a ten-hour day, whereas Matzeliger's machine could produce between 150 and 700 pairs per day, cutting shoe prices across the nation by half. A 29-cent US postal stamp was issued on September 15, 1991, in honour of Matzeliger. Designed by
Barbara Higgins Bond, the stamp depicts Matzeliger and is a part of the
Black Heritage Stamp Series. Matzeliger was inducted into the
National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006. ==Patents==