Best Foot Forward: The Shoe Industry in Massachusetts

Technological Advancements

<h2>Elias Howe, Jr. and the Sewing Machine</h2>
Massachusetts was birthplace and home of some of the greatest inventors in the history of American shoemaking. These innovators, including Elias Howe, Jr., Gordon McKay, and Charles Goodyear, Jr., created the machines that took shoemaking from the confines of handicraft to the realm of mass production.
Born in Spencer, Massachusetts in 1819, Elias Howe, Jr. worked in a textile factory until its closure in 1846 forced him into a career as a mechanic. That same year Howe combined his two disparate professional skill sets into the invention of a sewing machine that would revolutionize shoemaking.
While other sewing machines had been developed by 1846, Howe’s was the first to feature an automatic feed and a shuttle that could operate beneath the cloth to form a lock stitch. Another key player in the industrialization of shoemaking, John Brooks Nichols, devised a method of sewing uppers—the top portion of shoes—using the new machine, expediting one of the most time-consuming phases of shoe creation.

Inventors

Early Shoemaking

Workers' Lives

Selling Shoes

War Changes an Industry

Library of Congress

HathiTrust

Charles Goodyear Jr. (1833-1896) followed in the innovative footsteps of his father, Charles Goodyear, who invented the rubber vulcanization process. The younger Goodyear invented a welting process for attaching the heel of a shoe to the sole by machine. The welt works as an attaching point for the sole and shoe, usually leather or rubber lining the outsole, allowing shoes to be resoled when worn down. The process lent each pair of shoes a lifespan of years, if not decades.
Although the resoling process became mechanized with Goodyear’s invention of the “Goodyear Welting Machine,” it was nonetheless time-consuming. The multi-step process required a skilled operator’s presence at the helm of the device.