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This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
The flat-bottomed paper bag is a marvel of quiet utility. It stands tall at the checkout counter of grocery stores ready to cradle the essentials of daily life — from fresh produce to a warm baguette, magazines or a carton of eggs. Billions of shoppers around the world carry them in their arms as they exit supermarkets and department stores.
But it might not have been as ubiquitous today — so much more useful than the envelope-like paper bags that were commonly used before — were it not for the innovative mind of Margaret E. Knight, who was arguably the most successful female American inventor of the 19th century.
In 1867, Knight was working as a bag bundler at the Columbia Paper Bag Company in Springfield, Mass., where she abhorred the cumbersome and time-consuming method of making every paper bag by hand. She sought a way to automate the process.
“She began to experiment with a machine that could feed, cut and fold the paper automatically and, most important, form the squared bottom of the bag,” Henry Petroski, a Duke University engineering professor and technology historian, wrote in American Scholar magazine in 2003.
It didn’t take her long; she had a working model in about a year. But she was soon shocked to discover that a charlatan named Charles Annan, who worked at the machine shop in which her prototype had been built, tried to patent the device as his own. She hired a patent lawyer and took Annan to court.
Annan’s only reported defense was that a “woman could not possibly understand the mechanical complexities of the machine.” But Knight brought to court her blueprints for the original design, along with notebooks, models and witnesses who testified on her behalf. She won her case, becoming the first woman in the United States to win a patent interference lawsuit. On July 11, 1871, she earned U.S. patent No. 116,842 for her invention.
Throughout her life, Knight saw intractable problems as opportunities for innovation; she invented nearly 90 devices and obtained 27 U.S. patents.
Margaret Eloise Knight was born on Feb. 14, 1838, in York, Maine, a coastal resort town near the state’s southern tip, to James and Hannah (Teal) Knight.
From a young age, Margaret was intrigued by the mechanical devices that proliferated during the early Industrial Revolution. As a girl she eschewed dolls, tea sets and other familiar toys in favor of making her own playthings — sleds, wooden toys, kites — using all manner of tools.
“As a child, I never cared for things that girls usually do,” she said in an interview with the magazine The Woman’s Journal in 1872. “The only things I wanted were a jack knife, a gimlet and pieces of wood.”
Margaret’s father died when she was young, and her mother moved her and her siblings to the thriving mill city of Manchester, N.H., seeking work.
In an era well before child labor laws existed, Knight began working at the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company textile mill when she was just 12. Her first breakthrough innovation came when she witnessed a horrific accident: One of the steel-tipped flying shuttles used in the factory’s looms to weave thread rocketed off the machine and badly cut a young worker.
Within months, Knight designed a metal guard that kept the shuttles in place and caused the loom to shut down if the system failed. Her concept was adopted by mills throughout the cotton industry, but, being far too young to understand the patent process, she made not a penny on her invention.
Though she had barely attended school and had no formal engineering training, Knight continued inventing in a wide variety of fields — from automobile engines to shoemaking.
She is often incorrectly credited with being the first woman in the United States to receive a patent. In fact, Mary Dixon Kies received a patent on May 5, 1809, for a process for weaving straw with silk in the hat-making industry. Several other women received patents before Knight as well.
But she was so prolific that newspapers and magazines often referred to her as “Lady Edison.” She was enshrined in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio, in 2006.
Knight died of pneumonia and gallstones on Oct. 12, 1914, in Framingham, Mass. She was 76.
She would undoubtedly have been pleased to know that her paper bag machine — her most successful and lucrative invention — would lead to the use of flat-bottomed bags all over the world for the next century and a half and beyond. Though the technology in manufacturing them has advanced, her basic concept remains at the heart of the bag-making machinery.
A model of her patented machine is on display at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and a concept version of the bag has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Knight’s fight with Annan was not her last court battle. She faced numerous thefts of her intellectual property and legal challenges to her patents and designs, but she refused to back down. In the early 1900s, she fought a tense legal battle over the patent rights to one of her automobile engine innovations. She had to pay her patent lawyer $100 a day (the equivalent of as much as $3,500 a day in today’s money) plus expenses over a 16-day trial, onerous costs that she could ill afford.
“But I won the case,” Knight said in an interview with The Boston Sunday Post in 1912, “and I have never contested a patent without retrieving the award.”
Though she sometimes worked in textile mills and engraving studios and also repaired houses, Knight preferred to do her inventing from her office in Boston, accepting royalties for her work. She designed and patented a raft of household items, including a dress and skirt shield, a clasp for robes, and a barbecue spit for cooking meat. Becoming fascinated with the automobile revolution, she designed the first rotary engines, along with a “sleeve valve motor” — a valve mechanism for piston engines that was used in luxury cars before World War II.
“I suppose it does seem odd that a woman should appear in the role of an inventor,” Knight told The Sunday Post, “but that’s the part I have played in this world for many years.”
Her avoidance of the spotlight, however, kept her in relative obscurity, and few if any photographs of her exist in the public sphere today.
“I guess I have never learned the value of publicity,” she said. “For I never care to be interviewed. I like to produce results rather than talk about them.”
“Because of the culture of the time period, most women felt this was something they couldn’t or even shouldn’t do,” Rini Paiva, an executive vice president of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, said in an interview. “But Margaret was her own advocate. She didn’t have a man in her family who helped her. She did it herself, which was fantastic and admirable.”
An article in The New York Times in 1913 about the increasing number of women among the ranks of inventors singled out Knight as the oldest and “the one having most to her credit,” adding that she “is working 20 hours a day on her 89th invention.”
While her career was successful, she never became wealthy, though she enjoyed a comfortable life in Framingham, where she spent her last 25 years. When she died, she had less than $300 to her name. She never married and left no known survivors. Her legacy, however, was indelible.
“I’m not surprised at what I’ve done,” Knight told The Women’s Journal in 1872. “I’m only sorry I couldn’t have had as good a chance as a boy and been put to my trade regularly.”
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