Margaret E. Knight

Margaret Ethridge Knight ( born February 14, 1838 in York, Maine; † October 12, 1914 ) was an American inventor who developed in 1870 a machine for the manufacture of brown paper bags with soil.

Her parents were James Knight and Hannah Teal. From the age of eight years she worked in a cotton mill. At the age of 12 years, after an accident at the mill, she invented an emergency stop of the machine.

1868, when she lived in Springfield and worked for the Columbia Paper Bag Company in Massachusetts, she realized that the envelopes shaped like paper bags were impractical, and began the development of a machine, the paper bags shaped with a flat bottom and sticks. She spent a year in order to design a wooden model. In the company, who then built a metal model, Charles Annan stole the design and wanted to patent it yourself. After a successful patent dispute they received the patent in 1873 and founded with a businessman from Massachusetts, the Eastern Paper Bag Co..