Handwerker · Artisans
Charles Goodyear Jr.
Mechanised the welt in the 1870s and made a repairable shoe affordable.
Goodyear developed welt-stitching machinery from earlier designs in the 1870s. It allowed welted construction in which the sole is stitched to a welt rather than to the upper, and can therefore be replaced, to be produced in quantity. Northampton's modern industry and the entire market for good factory shoes rest on it.
What the machine did
Hand welting requires a maker to cut a holdfast from the insole and stitch through it with an awl, which is slow and skilled. Goodyear's machinery substituted a glued canvas rib and a stitching machine, producing a welt in minutes rather than hours.
The construction is slightly weaker (the glued rib can eventually fail where a carved holdfast cannot), and it is enormously cheaper. That trade-off created the category of the good affordable shoe.
The name
His father, Charles Goodyear senior, developed vulcanised rubber and is the Goodyear the tyre company is named after. Neither man had any connection to the tyre business, which was named in tribute after the elder Goodyear's death.
The shoe construction and the tyre company therefore share a name for the same underlying reason and no direct one.
What it meant for Northampton
Northampton had made shoes by hand for two centuries and was already the English centre. The welting machinery arrived at the point when the town was industrialising and let it produce, in quantity, the construction it had been making one pair at a time.
The town's surviving factories still use the same construction, and the clustering of makers, last makers and leather merchants that grew around it is why the trade has been so difficult to relocate.
Mechanising the welt, and what it made possible
Hand-welting is slow, and before the welt could be machine-stitched a repairable, water-resistant, properly-constructed shoe was necessarily expensive. The machine did not make a better shoe than a hand-welted one; it made a good enough one affordable, which had far larger consequences.
Almost every quality shoe discussed on this site descends from that machine, and the entire Northampton industry was built on it.