Margaret E. Knight facts for kids

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Quick facts for kids Margaret E. Knight

Born	Margaret Eloise Knight (1838-02-14)February 14, 1838 York, Maine, U.S.
Died	October 12, 1914(1914-10-12) (aged 76) Framingham, Massachusetts, U.S.
Nationality	American
Occupation	Inventor
Known for	Machine to produce flat-bottomed paper bags
Notable work	Paper bag machine
Parent(s)	Hannah Teal and James Knight

Margaret Eloise Knight (born February 14, 1838 – died October 12, 1914) was an amazing American inventor. She is most famous for creating a machine that made flat-bottomed paper bags. People called her "the most famous 19th-century woman inventor." In 1870, she started the Eastern Paper Bag Company. This company made paper bags for groceries, much like the ones we use today. Margaret Knight earned many patents for her inventions. She became a symbol for women's empowerment, showing what women could achieve.

Early Life and First Invention
Career as an Inventor
- The Flat-Bottomed Paper Bag Machine
- Later Inventions
Later Life
Legacy and Impact
Patents
Works About Her
See also

Early Life and First Invention

Margaret E. Knight was born in York, Maine, on February 14, 1838. Her parents were Hannah Teal and James Knight. When she was a little girl, her family and friends called her "Mattie." Mattie loved to play with woodworking tools instead of dolls. She once said, "the only things [she] wanted were a jack knife, a gimlet, and pieces of wood." As a child, she was known for making cool kites and sleds.

Margaret's father died when she was young. Her mother raised Mattie and her brothers, Charlie and Jim. The family moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, because they needed work. They found jobs in cotton mills. Margaret's formal education was short. She left school at age 12 to work in the mills with her siblings.

When she was 12, Margaret saw a terrible accident at the mill. A worker was hurt by a steel-tipped shuttle that flew out of a mechanical loom. Within weeks, Margaret invented a safety device for the loom. Other mills in Manchester later used her invention. She never patented this device, so we don't know exactly what it looked like. It might have stopped the loom if a thread broke, or it could have been a guard to block the flying shuttle.

Margaret had some health problems, so she couldn't keep working at the cotton mill. In her teenage years and early twenties, she had many different jobs. She worked in home repair, daguerreotype photography, engraving, and furniture upholstery.

Career as an Inventor

Margaret Knight's first patent was given to her in 1870. It was for an "improvement in paper-feeding machines." This machine helped printing presses and paper-folding machines work better. Her famous paper bag machine would later use a similar three-step folding process. At that time, many women inventors used only their initials to hide their gender. But Margaret E. Knight was clearly named on her patent.

The Flat-Bottomed Paper Bag Machine

In 1867, Knight moved to Springfield, Massachusetts. She started working at the Columbia Paper Bag Company. She noticed that the paper bags they made were shaped like envelopes. They were weak and narrow. They couldn't stand up on their own and were hard to fill with bulky items like groceries. Flat-bottomed paper bags were much stronger and more useful. But they had to be made by hand, which was slow and expensive.

Flat-bottomed bags were already used in Britain since the 1840s. People had tried to improve how they were made by hand. But Margaret wanted to make the process fully automatic. In 1868, she invented a machine that could cut, fold, and glue paper. This machine created the flat-bottomed brown paper bags that shoppers still know today. Her invention made it possible to produce these bags much faster.

Margaret built a wooden model of her machine. But she needed a working iron model to apply for a patent. Charles Annan, a machinist, visited the shop where Margaret's iron model was being built. He stole her design and patented it first! When Margaret tried to patent her own invention, she found out about Annan's patent. She filed a lawsuit against him in 1870.

Annan argued that Margaret, as a woman, "could not possibly understand the mechanical complexities of the machine." He might have been trying to use unfair ideas about women. Margaret fought back with strong evidence. She showed her detailed hand-drawn blueprints, her journals, and her models. Many witnesses also said that she had been making drawings and models since 1867. She spent a lot of money, $100 a day, on legal costs for the 16-day hearing. But she won! She received her patent in 1871.

For her amazing invention of the paper bag machine, Queen Victoria of England honored Margaret Knight in 1871.

Margaret started the Eastern Paper Bag Company in Hartford, Connecticut, with a business partner. She wasn't interested in managing the business. Instead, she received royalties (payments for each bag sold) from the company. This allowed her to keep working as an inventor. In 1879, she got another patent for improvements to her paper bag machine. She sold this patent to Eastern Paper Bag Company too. Margaret earned a good income from her paper bag royalties. She continued this pattern for the rest of her career, selling her inventions to companies and living on the money she earned from patents and royalties.

Margaret moved to Ashland and then Framingham, Massachusetts. She worked from an office in downtown Boston.

Later Inventions

In the 1880s, Margaret designed three inventions for the home. She patented a dress and skirt shield in 1883. In 1884, she patented a clasp for robes. And in 1885, she invented a cooking spit. In the 1880s and 1890s, Knight worked on machines for making shoes. She received six patents for different machines used to cut shoe materials. In the early 1900s, Margaret developed parts for rotary engines and motors. She received patents for these from 1902 to 1915, even after she passed away.

Her many other inventions include two patents from 1894: a numbering machine and a window frame with a sash. In total, she was granted at least 27, and possibly 30, patents. She also invented many other devices that she did not patent.

Later Life

Margaret Knight kept working on inventions late into her life. A newspaper article from 1913 said she was "working twenty hours a day on her eighty-ninth invention."

Margaret was never super rich, but she lived more comfortably as an adult than when she was a child. She never married and passed away alone on October 12, 1914, at age 76.

Legacy and Impact

As a female inventor, Margaret Knight faced some challenges. It's true that at the time she patented her paper bag machine, very few women held patents. Even today, fewer than 10% of primary inventors are women.

One newspaper called Margaret Knight a "woman Edison," comparing her to the famous inventor Thomas Edison. Later in her life, Margaret was seen as a leader for women. Her achievements inspired women's rights activists and suffragettes (women who fought for the right to vote). She was featured in newspapers and magazines alongside other women inventors. A 1913 article in The New York Times called "Women Who Are Inventors" showed that women were indeed inventive. This article was written to challenge the idea that women were not as smart or creative as men. It highlighted nine women inventors, with Margaret Knight being the most important.

A plaque in Framingham, Massachusetts honors Margaret Knight. It says she was the "first woman awarded a U.S. patent." However, she was not actually the first. That honor belongs to either Mary Dixon Kies or Hannah Slater.

The flat-bottomed paper bag machine was Margaret Knight's most successful invention. Her bags were a bit different from modern ones. They didn't have accordion-folded sides, which make modern bags more compact. Another inventor, Luther Crowell, patented accordion-pleated bags in 1872. Margaret's paper bags replaced cloth sacks, crates, and boxes for shopping. They were standard for almost a century. Then, in the 1970s and 80s, a cheap way to make disposable plastic bags was developed, and plastic bags became more common.

Margaret Knight was honored by being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006. A smaller, but fully working, model of her original bag-making machine is on display at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C..

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

Lynn Ng Quezon: Mattie and the Machine: A Novel. Santa Monica Press, 2022. This is a novel for young adults (ages 12+).
Emily Arnold McCully: Marvelous Mattie: How Margaret E. Knight Became an Inventor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006. This children's book was recognized as one of the "best feminist books for young readers" in 2007.
DiMeo, Nate. no. 116,842 The Memory Palace Podcast Episode 78, November 5, 2015. This podcast tells the story of Margaret Knight, her early life, and her 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.
Sam Maggs: Wonder Women: 25 Innovators, Inventors, and Trailblazers who Changed History, published by Quirk Books on October 24, 2016. This book includes a section about Knight's most notable inventions and her life.