the industrial arts--in domestic devices, in mechanical appliances, in electricity through all its wide range of uses, in engineering skill and in chemical compounds. The fact is made quite clear that the names obtained were necessarily only a fractional part of the number granted patents. It developed through these inquiries that some very important industries now in operation on a large scale in our country are based on the inventions of Negroes. Foremost among these is the gigantic enterprise known as The United Shoe Machinery Company of Boston. In a biographical sketch of its president, Mr. Sidney W. Winslow, a multimillionaire,[19] it is related that he claims to have laid the foundation of his immense fortune in the purchase of a patent for an invention by a Dutch Guiana Negro named Jan E. Matzeliger. This inventor was born in Dutch Guiana, September, 1852. His parents were a native Negro woman and her husband, a Dutch engineer, who had been sent there from Holland to direct the government construction works at that place. As a very young man Matzeliger came to this country and served an apprenticeship as a cobbler, first in Philadelphia and later in Lynn, Massachusetts. The hardships which he suffered gradually undermined his health and before being able to realize the full value of his invention, he passed away in 1889 in the thirty-seventh year of his age. He invented a machine for lasting shoes. This was the first appliance of its kind capable of performing all the steps required to hold a shoe on its last, grip and pull the leather down around the heel, guide and drive the nails into place and then discharge the completed shoe from the machine. This patent when bought by Mr. Winslow was made to form the nucleus of the great United Shoe Machinery Company, which now operates on a capital stock of more than twenty million dollars, gives regular employment to over 5,000 operatives, occupies with its factories more than 20 acres of ground, and represents the consolidation of over 40 subsidiary companies. The establishment and maintenance of this gigantic business enterprise forms one of the biggest items in the history of our country's industrial development.