Margaret Knight – © 2009 – 2015 Quirky Incorporated
Margaret E. Knight was born in York, Maine in 1838. She was raised with two older brothers by her mother and father until he passed away when Margaret was only 12 years old. After her father passed away, her mother moved the family to Manchester, New Hampshire to work in the textile industry. When she was young, she enjoyed playing and working with small tools, such as pocketknives and drills. She devised many toys and such for her and her brothers to play with. She loved creating things and would often make sleds, kites, and other fun toys for herself and neighbors to have for themselves (Famous Women Inventors, 2008).
As she was growing up and attending elementary school, she would often take lunches to her brothers who worked at the textile factory. Margaret loved being at the factory, watching the machines progress and learning about how it all worked. One time at the factory when she was visiting, one of the machines broke down and she watched as a high speed hardwood shuttle broke from off of the loom and injure a worker in the factory. Because of this incident, Margaret decided to come up with a device that would prevent this from happening again, and therefore attempt to prevent anymore future accidents within the factory. She created a covered shuttle, so these types of accidents couldn’t occur anymore. Being only 12 years old, she knew nothing about patents and therefore was not given credit for this invention that would be just the beginning of her creative, inventor future (Kate Kelly, 2014).
After finishing elementary school, Margaret began working at the textile mills. She watched the machinery very closely, discovering their every step and move, making herself knowledgeable about the processes each machine carried out. Once she became knowledgeable enough, she moved up in the world of factory working and moved to Springfield, Massachusetts where she began a new job working for a company that produced brown paper bags. Her job at the factory was to fold and glue paper bags by hand. After seeing how long this process was by hand and how much easier to handle paper bags with a flat bottom would be, Margaret created the first machine to produce brown paper bags with a flat bottom.
Margaret went on to creating and inventing many other machines and things that she patented back in the late 19th century and early 20th century. She spent the rest of her life still dwelling on the east coast. She was never married, nor did she have any children. Margaret died in 1914. All of her accomplishments earned her the nickname “Woman Edison” (Karwatka, 2010), but I think she is much better than that nickname. I think she is the amazing female inventor Margaret Knight.
