All about Shoes

It wasn’t so very long ago that most of the world’s population didn’t wear shoes at all; for most people they were too expensive and so it was only the rich who wore them. Today thanks to mass factory production shoes are much cheaper so much so that many people have a pair of shoes for every occasion.

During the American Civil War (1861–1865) thousands of shoes had to be mass produced for the soldiers and to make things easier — for the first time ever! — left- and right-footed shoes and shoe sizes were introduced. Shoes were all handmade at that point in a slow tedious process. But then Jan Matzeliger an immigrant from Dutch Guiana working in a Philadelphia shoe factory revolutionized the shoe industry by developing a machine that attached the sole to the shoe in one minute.

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