Margaret E. Knight

Margaret Eloise Knight (February 14, 1838 – October 12, 1914^[1][2]) was an American inventor, notably of a machine to produce flat-bottomed paper bags. She has been called "the most famous 19th-century woman inventor".^[3] She founded the Eastern Paper Bag Company in 1870, creating paper bags for groceries similar in form to the ones that would be used in later generations. Knight received dozens of patents in different fields, and became a symbol for women's empowerment.

Early life[]

Margaret E. Knight was born in York, Maine on February 14, 1838 to Hannah Teal and James Knight.^[4] As a little girl, “Mattie,” as her parents and friends nicknamed her, preferred to play with woodworking tools instead of dolls, stating that “the only things [she] wanted were a jack knife, a gimlet, and pieces of wood.”^[5] She was known as a child for her kites and sleds.^[6]

Knight and her brothers Charlie and Jim were raised by their widowed mother;^[4] Knight's father died when she was young, after which the impoverished family moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, where employment was available in the cotton mills.^[7] Any formal education she had was limited to secondary school,^[5] as she left to work in the mills at age 12^[6] with her siblings.^[7]

12-year-old Knight witnessed an accident at the mill in which a worker was stabbed by a steel-tipped shuttle that shot out of a mechanical loom. Within weeks she invented a safety device for the loom, which was later adopted by other Manchester mills. The device was never patented and its exact nature is unknown, though it may have been either a device to stop the loom when the shuttle thread broke or a guard to physically block a flying shuttle.^[7]

Health problems precluded Knight from continuing to work at the cotton mill.^[7] In her teens and early 20s she held several jobs, including in home repair, daguerreotype photography, engraving, and furniture upholstery.^[6][7]

Career[]

Flat-bottomed paper bag machine[]

Knight moved to Springfield, Massachusetts in 1867 and was hired by the Columbia Paper Bag Company.^[7] She noticed that the envelope-shaped machine-made paper bags they produced were weak and narrow, and could not stand on their bases.^[5] Flat-bottomed paper bags, which were sturdier and more useful, were expensively made by hand.^[6][7]

She was not, however, the first person to come up with the idea of a flat-bottomed bag. They were already in general use in England, having been produced by hand since at least the 1840s, and improvements to hand-production techniques occurred during the 1850s:^{[citation needed]} for example, a patent was awarded to James Baldwin of Birmingham in 1853 for semi-mechanized apparatus to use in the making of flat-bottomed paper bags.^[8] Knight's machine enabled the mass manufacture of these kind of bags, much increasing the speed and consistency of production.

Thinking to automate the process, in 1868 Knight invented a machine that cut, folded, and glued paper to form the flat-bottomed brown paper bags familiar to shoppers today. Knight built a wooden prototype of the device, but needed a working iron model to apply for a patent. Charles Annan, who was in the machine shop where Knight's iron model was being built, stole her design and patented the device first.^[7] When Knight attempted to patent work, she discovered Knight's patent and filed a patent interference lawsuit in the fall of 1870.^[7] Annan argued that no woman could have designed the machine.^[6] Knight responded with copious evidence in the form of meticulous hand-drawn blueprints, journals, and models, and a number of witnesses who testified that she had been making drawings and models beginning in 1867.^[6][7] She spent the then-large sum of $100 per day in legal costs for the 16-day hearing, which resulted in victory.^[7] She received her patent in 1871.^[6][9]

With a Massachusetts business partner, Knight established the Eastern Paper Bag Co in Hartford, Connecticut.^[7] Having no interest in managing a business, she instead received royalties from the Eastern Paper Bag Company and continued to work as an inventor. She would she would continue in this pattern for the rest of her career, selling her various inventions to companies in order to live on royalties and patent sales. Knight moved to Ashland and then Framingham, Massachusetts, working in an office in downtown Boston.^[7] She acquired two further patents in 1871 and 1879 for improvements to the paper bag machine.^[5]

Later inventions[]

In the 1880s Knight designed three domestic inventions.^[5] She patented a dress and skirt shield in 1883, a clasp for robes in 1884, and a cooking spit in 1885.^[10] In the 1880s and 1890s Knight worked on machines for manufacturing shoes, receiving six patents for several machines used in cutting shoe materials.^[5] In the early 1900s Knight developed a number of components for rotary engines and motors, with patents being granted in 1902 to 1915 (after her death). Her understanding of this work was unfortunately limited by her lack of education.^[5]

Her many other inventions include two patents of 1894: a numbering machine, and a window frame and sash.^[10] In total she was granted at least 27^[6] and possibly 30 patents, though she also invented many devices she did not patent.^[7]

Later life[]

Knight continued her work late into life. A 1913 article in The New York Times reported that she was "working twenty hours a day on her eighty-ninth invention."^[7]

Knight was never wealthy, though she lived more comfortably as an adult than in childhood.^[6] Knight never married and died alone on October 12, 1914, at the age of 76,^[4][6] leaving an estate worth only $275.05.^[11]

Legacy[]

I’m only sorry I couldn’t have had as good a chance as a boy, and have been put to my trade regularly.

— Margaret Knight, reflecting late in life^[11]

Though Knight's difficulties as a female inventor have become mythologized beyond reality,^[11] she faced many challenges and limits.^[12] At the time Knight patented her paper bag machine, women held an extremely small fraction of patents. Today still, fewer than 10% of primary inventors are female.^[6]

An obituary described Knight as “woman Edison”.^[10] Toward the end of her life Knight was recognized as a leader among women, her achievements held as an example by women's rights activists and suffragettes. She was profiled in several pro-suffrage newspapers and magazines alongside other women inventors as "lady Edisons".^[7] She was featured in a 1913 New York Times article, "Women Who Are Inventors," which rebutted the idea of female intellectual inferiority.^[6] The 1913 article was written in response to a physician of the day who had drawn controversy with his opinion that women had their place in literature but were not inventive, pointing to the few women recorded as eminent artists, composers, inventors, or even professions thought feminine, such as chefs and fashion designers. The article rebutted that women had been sequestered in domestic work and denied those creative opportunities, and pointed to nine women inventors of the day, Knight foremost among them.^[13]

A plaque recognizing her as the "first woman awarded a U.S. patent" and holder of 87 U.S. patents hangs on the Curry Cottage at 287 Hollis St in Framingham. However, Knight was not actually the first: either Mary Kies or Hannah Slater holds that honor.^{[14][15][16][17]}

Knight's flat-bottomed paper bags were her most successful invention. They replaced cloth sacks, crates, and boxes for shopping, and were standard for nearly a century before being replaced by disposable plastic bags, for which a cheap manufacturing process was developed in the 1970s and 80s.^[7]

Knight was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006.^[1] A scaled-down but fully functional patent model of her original bag-making machine is in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C.^[6]

Patents[]

• 

  Improvement in paper feeding machines, 1870

• 

  Improvement in paper-bag machine, 1879

• 

  Sole cutting machine, 1890

• 

  Sole cutting machine, 1893

• 

  Reel, 1894

• 

  Numbering mechanism, 1894

• 

  Window frame with sash, 1894

• 

  Compound rotary engine, 1902

• 

  Rotary engine, 1902

• 

  Rotary engine, 1902

• 

  Automatic tool for boring or planing concave or cylindroidal surfaces, 1903

• 

  Internal combustion engine, 1913

Works about her[]

• Emily Arnold McCully: Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. 32pp. ISBN 0-374-34810-3. (Children's book which was recognized as one of the "best feminist books for young readers, 2007," awarded by the of the Feminist Task Force of the American Library Association.)
• DiMeo, Nate. no. 116,842 The Memory Palace Podcast Episode 78, November 5, 2015. (Podcast detailing Margaret Knight, her early life and inventions.)
• Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie: Women in science: antiquity through the nineteenth century: a biographical dictionary with annotated bibliography. 3rd ed. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1991, ISBN 0-262-65038-X, p. 110 f.
• Sam Maggs: Wonder Women: 25 Innovators, Inventors, and Trailblazers who Changed History, published by Quirk Books on October 24, 2016, distributed by Penguin House. (A section detailing Knight's most notable inventions and her life.)

See also[]

• Continental Paper Bag Co. v. Eastern Paper Bag Co.
• Francis Wolle

References[]

General references[]

• Allen, Stacey L. (1999). "Knight, Margaret E. (1838-1914), inventor". American National Biography. doi:10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article.1301960. Retrieved September 2, 2021.
• Famous Women Innovators. (2008). Margaret Knight Invention of the Paper Bag Machine. Retrieved from Famous Women Innovators: http://www.women-inventors.com/Margaret-Knight.asp

External links[]

• Margaret Knight, Invention of the Paper Bag Machine
• Patents held by Margaret E. Knight