Bag it up

People who think that only males have the brains or talent or initiative to invent things should learn about Margaret Eloise Knight, who had a mind for invention and used it!

Ms Knight was born on Valentine's Day, 1838 in York, Maine. Her dad died when she was but a child, and her mom moved the family to New Hampshire, where young Margaret went to work at a cotton mill at the age of 12 to help the family get by. That was the end of her formal education.

Cotton mills involved dangerous machinery, and - still a pre-teen - Margaret, having seen other workers injured, came up with her first invention to prevent machine injuries.

Of course, someone stole the idea. There was no way she could have accessed the patenting process, so she saw mills across the country using her idea without compensating her.

She moved on to Springfield, Massachusetts and found another factory job, this time at the Columbia Paper Bag Company. And again, she saw dangerous and inefficient conditions, and she put her mind to work. In 1868, she invented a machine that cold fold and glue paper bags. It was she who developed the technology of making paper bags with the flat bottom that we came to see over the years when bagging up our grapefruits, ginger ale, and Vienna sausages at the ShopSumMor.

Ms Knight was not about to get burned again with the patent. She saw a man (I shouldn't mention his name) (Charles Annan) trying to rip off her idea, but she had her original blueprints and won a patent lawsuit in 1871.

This model of her bag machine is in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

And from this, she co-founded the Eastern Paper Bag Company in Hartford, Connecticut, and went on to patent some 25 more inventions, including a shoe-making machine and a clasp for robes. The woman who once said, “I’m only sorry I couldn’t have had as good a chance as a boy” was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006.