Margaret Eloise Knight (February 14, 1838 – October 12, 1914[1][2]) was an American inventor, notably of a machine to produce flat-bottomed paper bags.

[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.

[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.

[7] In her teens and early 20s she held several jobs, including in home repair, daguerreotype photography, engraving, and furniture upholstery.

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.

[7] She noticed that the envelope-shaped machine-made paper bags they produced were weak and narrow, and could not stand on their bases.

Machines for producing these envelope-style bags were the subject of three patents issued to Francis Wolle in 1852, 1855, and 1858.

[citation needed] For example, a patent was awarded to James Baldwin of Birmingham in 1853 for semi-mechanized apparatus to use in the making of flat-bottomed paper bags.

[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] 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.

[6][7] She spent the then-large sum of $100 (equivalent to $2,409 in 2023) per day in legal costs for the 16-day hearing, which resulted in victory.

[6][11] For her invention of the paper bag machine, Knight was decorated by Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom in 1871.

[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.

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.

[5] In the early 1900s Knight developed several components for rotary engines and motors, with patents being granted in 1902 to 1915 (after her death).

A 1913 article in The New York Times reported that she was "working twenty hours a day on her eighty-ninth invention.

[10] I’m only sorry I couldn’t have had as good a chance as a boy, and have been put to my trade regularly.As a female inventor, Knight faced certain challenges and limits.

[7] She was featured in a 1913 New York Times article, "Women Who Are Inventors," which rebutted the idea of female intellectual inferiority.

[6] The 1913 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.

However, Knight was not actually the first: either Mary Kies, Hannah Slater, or Hazel Irwin, who received a patent for a cheese press in 1808,[14][15] holds that honor.

[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] Compound Rotary Engine.