Margaret Knight

Margaret Knight, inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2006, has at least 26 inventions, her most famous being a machine for making flat-bottomed paper bags—the grocery bag. She knew she was different from other girls at a very young age and wanted to work with tools and wood. Dictated by economic circumstances to work in a textile mill before she was a teenager, Knight created her first invention before she was 13, a safety device that became standard equipment on looms. Not only did she spend years perfecting her machine to make flat-bottomed paper bags, Knight also had to defend that the patent idea was hers before the Commissioner of Patents. The machine folded a web of paper into a tube and performed the cutting, folding, and pasting that was required to result in the paper bag that we call a grocery bag. A version of Knight’s machine is housed at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. A discussion of the merits and drawbacks of paper, plastic, and recyclable grocery bags is included in the chapter as well.