Margaret E. Knight

American inventor (&#;)

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Margaret Eloise Knight (February 14, &#; October 12, [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 , 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, , 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

Knight's first patent, issued in , was for an "improvement in paper-feeding machines", a "pneumatic paper-feeder" with applications in printing presses and paper-folding machines; her paper bag machine would feature a three-step folding process in forming the flat bottom. At the time, many female inventors and writers concealed their gender by using only an initial instead of their given name, but Margaret E. Knight was identified in this patent.[3]

Flat-bottomed paper bag machine

Knight moved to Springfield, Massachusetts in 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] They were also poorly suited to bulky items, such as groceries and hardware goods. Machines for producing these envelope-style bags were the subject of three patents issued to Francis Wolle in , , and .[3] Flat-bottomed paper bags, which were sturdier and more useful, were expensively made by hand.[6][7]

Such flat-bottomed bags were already in general use in Britain since at least the s and improvements to hand-production techniques occurred during the s.[citation needed] For example, a patent was awarded to James Baldwin of Birmingham in for semi-mechanized apparatus to use in the making of flat-bottomed paper bags.[8] However, thinking to more fully automate the process, in Knight invented a machine that cut, folded, and glued paper to form the flat-bottomed brown paper bag familiar to shoppers today. This machine enabled the mass manufacture of flat-bottomed bags, increasing the speed of production.[7][9]

Knight built a wooden prototype of the device, but needed a working iron model to apply for a patent.[7] Charles Annan (or Anan[10]), a machinist who visited the machine shop where Knight's iron model was being built,[10] stole her design and patented it first.[7] When Knight attempted to patent her work, she discovered Annan's patent and filed a patent interference lawsuit in the fall of .[7] Annan argued that "she could not possibly understand the mechanical complexities of the machine", possibly exploiting prejudice against women,[3] and/or that his was a different machine (likely on the basis of details he had misremembered),[10] and that she had not succeeded in creating a working machine.[7] Some authors, such as Ryan Smith of the Smithsonian Magazine, state Annan argued no woman could have designed the machine,[6] though according to Michael Abrams of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, this is a modern exaggeration of Annan's sole argument that his was a different machine.[10] 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 .[6][7] She spent the then-large sum of $100 (equivalent to $2,409 in ) per day in legal costs for the 16-day hearing, which resulted in victory.[7] She received her patent in .[6][11]

For her invention of the paper bag machine, Knight was decorated by Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom in .[10][12]

With a Massachusetts business partner, Knight established the Eastern Paper Bag Company 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.[7] She acquired a further patent in for improvements to the paper bag machine. It was also assigned to Eastern. Though Knight earned a comfortable income from her paper bag royalties, they were however capped at $25,000 and therefore ended after a time.[3] She would continue in this pattern for the rest of her career, selling her various inventions to companies to live on royalties and patent sales.[7]

Knight moved to Ashland and then Framingham, Massachusetts, working in an office in downtown Boston.[7]

Later inventions

In the s Knight designed three domestic inventions.[5] She patented a dress and skirt shield in , a clasp for robes in , and a cooking spit in .[13] In the s and s Knight worked on machines for manufacturing shoes, receiving six patents for several machines used in cutting shoe materials.[5] In the early s Knight developed several components for rotary engines and motors, with patents being granted in to (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 : a numbering machine, and a window frame and sash.[13] 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 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, , at the age of 76,[4][6] leaving an estate worth only $275.05.[10]

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

[

10

]

As a female inventor, Knight faced certain challenges and limits.[9] At the time Knight patented her paper bag machine, women held a tiny fraction of patents. Today still, fewer than 10% of primary inventors are female.[6]

An obituary described Knight as a "woman Edison".[13] Late in 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 New York Times article, "Women Who Are Inventors," which rebutted the idea of female intellectual inferiority.[6] The article was written in response to a certain physician's controversial opinion that women had their place in literature but were not inventive; he pointed to the few women recorded as eminent artists, composers, inventors or even professions thought feminine, such as chefs and fashion designers. The article responded that women had been sequestered in domestic work and denied creative opportunities, and pointed to nine women inventors of the day, Knight foremost among them.[12]

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, Hannah Slater, or Hazel Irwin, who received a patent for a cheese press in ,[14][15] holds that honor.[16][17][18][19]

The flat-bottomed paper bag machine was Knight's most successful invention.[7] Knight's bags differed somewhat from modern ones. They did not have accordion-folded sides like modern bags, which are therefore more compact in storage and have more defined corners; Luther Crowell patented an accordion-pleated bag in . Another feature developed later was easy unfolding into a square-bottomed shape.[3] Paper bags 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 s and 80s.[7]

Knight was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in .[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

Compound Rotary Engine. USA &#; -12-30

Rotary Engine. USA &#; -01-06

Rotary engine. USA &#; -02-17

Rotary engine. USA &#; -06-09

Automatic Tool For Boring Or Planing Concave Or Cylindrical Surfaces. USA &#; -11-03

Rotary engine. USA &#; -04-26

Rotary-Motor. USA &#; -12-20

Resilient Wheel. USA &#; -01-23

Internal-Combustion Engine. USA &#; -07-29. K D Motor Company

Packing-Ring. USA &#; -02-03. K D Motor Company

Internal-Combustion Engine. USA &#; -03-23. K D Motor Company

Improvement in paper-feeding machines. US USA. Granted -11-15

Improvement in paper-bag machines. US USA. Granted -10-28.

Paper-bag machine. USREE. Granted -05-18.

Skirt-protector. US USA. Granted -08-07, with Harriet M. Macfarland.

Clasp. US USA. Granted -10-14.

Spit. US USA. Granted -02-03.

Sole-cutting machine. US USA. She granted -09-16.

Machine for cutting shoe soles. US USA. She granted -09-16.

Sole cutting machine. US USA. Granted -01-20.

Sole-cutting machine. US USA.

Window frame and sash. US USA. Granted -05-08. With Albert B. Harrington

Winding reel. US USA. Granted -06-12. With Robert D. Evans And John S. Lockwood.

Machine for cutting boots or shoe soles. US USA. Granted -08-07.

Numbering mechanism. US USA. Granted -10-09. With Charles S. Gooding.

Reel. US USA. Granted -10-09.

Works about her

See also

References

General references

Abstract: Paper Bag Machine, as the name implies, is used for the production of paper bags of mechanical equipment. It is generally white cardboard, white paperboard, coated paper, Kraft paper as raw materials, through a number of processes to make different paper bags. There are many kinds of paper bag machines, such as single-sheet paper bag machine, paper bag forming machine, paper yarn compound paper bag machine, food paper bag machine, etc. . &#;Here&#;s a look at the use and type of paper bag machine.

&#;.What does the paper bag machine do?

The paper bag machine was invented to solve the environmental pollution caused by the plastic bags. It can be used to mass production the environmental protection paper bags and meet the requirements of green and environmental protection. The paper bag machine is usually made of white cardboard, white board paper, Copper Board paper and Kraft paper, it can produce many kinds of paper bags including handbag, cement bag, laminated paper bag, four-layer paper bag, garment bag, food bag, shopping bag, gift bag, etc. .

&#;.Which kinds of paper bag machine?

There are many kinds of paper bag machines. We usually choose the right kind of paper bag machines according to the size of the paper bag and the thickness of the paper. Commonly used paper bag machines include:

• 1. The single-sheet type hand-held paper bag machine automatically produces the hand-held paper bag with the printed 70-200g/M2 single sheet paper, laminating film or web paper as raw materials, the utility model has the advantages of stable production, low noise, high rate of finished products, fast production speed, simple operation, easy control, automatic alarm, etc. .
• 2. The paper bag forming machine is made of hard paper with 128-300g/m2 as raw material, using hot melt glue, various OPP, light oil, light oil, light glue and other auxiliary materials, automatically feeding paper, gluing, pasting barrel and folding organ position, it has the advantages of quick drying time, strong viscosity and no overflow and leakage.
• 3. Paper Yarn Compound Paper Bag Machine, which is used to produce paper yarn compound paper bag. It is suitable for packing grain, dry fresh, starch, feed, building materials, chemical industry, mineral products and other powder granular materials, the utility model has the advantages of small floor area, low power consumption, fast installation, low noise, no pollution, etc. .
• 4. The Reel Type Foursquare bottom paper bag machine is made of 70-170g/m2 Web as raw material through the processes of drum making, gluing, forming, indentation, paste bottom and output, etc. , mainly used in the production of food bags, handbags, small grain packaging bags and dust bags.
• 5. Food Paper Bag Machine, also take web paper as raw material, by folding, forming, cutting bag, glue, folding bottom, paste bottom, finished bag output process is made once, is the production of shopping bags, garment bags, snack bags, bread bags, vomit bags, dry fruit bags and other environmentally-friendly bags ideal equipment.
• 6. Four-color printing drum paper bag making machine, by drum making machine, paste bottom machine, printing machine three parts, using PLC Photoelectric program control system automatically completed, precision and efficiency are quite high, mainly used in the production of cement paper bags, starch paper bags, tea paper bags and chemical raw materials paper bags.