Margaret E. Knight, Inventor (Boston Sunday Post, March 31, 1912, p. 4)

Women and Adversity:
Margaret E. Knight
  ‘Woman Edison’
Inventor of Machines

My second December repeat post is of Margaret “Mattie” Eloise Knight. She is quoted as saying, “I’m only sorry I couldn’t have had as good a chance as a boy.”

Knight wasn’t like the average girl who played with dolls and wanted to be a wife and mother. Her world revolved around tools and machines. She was born in 1838 and at age 12, invented a safety device that prevented the shuttle from falling off a loom. She couldn’t patent her invention because she was too young to get a patent.

Flat-bottom bags are part of our shopping experience and most of us, I’m sure, have never questioned how they were invented. Look back to Knight, who wanted to find a way to make bags easier to fold. In 1867, while working at The Columbia Paper Bag Company in Springfield, Massachusetts, she saw the machine had problems, so she invented a machine that cut, glued and folded a bag so its bottom was flat.

There’s more to the story. She made a wooden model and asked machine shop worker Charles Annan to make an iron model of her design. He stole her design and had it patented. She filed a lawsuit against him and got the patent in 1871.  She and a partner then established the Eastern Paper Bag Company, acquired two more patents that made the production more efficient and then mass-produced paper bags. The machine is displayed in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

Among her other inventions:

1883 –  dress and skirt shield
1884 – clasp for robes
1885 – barbeque spit for cooking meats
1890 – shoe cutting machines
1894 – window frame and sash

 Bio:

• Born February 14, 1838, in York, Maine
• When her father died, the family moved to Manchester, New Hampshire
• 1850 – Left school and began working
• 1867 – Moved to Springfield, Massachusetts and worked at Columbia Paper Bag Company
• 1880s-1890s – focused on inventing household items
• 2006 – Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame

Knight never married. She died on October 12, 1914 at the age of 76.

More information:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3-lgR2EHUc
biographies.framinghamhistory.org/margaret-e-knight

www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/margaret-e-knight

My ebooks are available at amazon.com and barnesandnoble.com:
Honoring 23 Black Women, Recognizing 23 Notable Mothers, Saluting 23 Faithful Suffragists