Margaret E. Knight

Margaret Ethridge Knight (born February 14, 1838 in York , Maine ; died October 12, 1914 ) was an American inventor who developed a machine for making bottom paper bags in 1870 .

Life

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

In 1868, while living in Springfield and working for the Columbia Paper Bag Company in Massachusetts , she realized that the paper bags shaped like envelopes were impractical and began developing a machine that would shape and glue flat-bottomed paper bags. She spent a year designing a wooden model. In the company that then built a metal model, Charles Annan stole the design and wanted to patent it himself. After a successful patent dispute, she received the patent in 1873 and founded the Eastern Paper Bag Co. with a businessman from Massachusetts .

Patents (selection)

Paper processing, 1870
Paper bag machine, 1879
Shoe manufacture, 1890
Shoe manufacture, 1893
Coil, 1894
Counting mechanism, 1894
Window latch, 1894
Rotary engine, 1902
Rotary engine, 1902
Rotary engine, 1902
Drilling and Smoothing, 1903
Internal combustion engine, 1913

literature

Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie : Women in science: antiquity through the nineteenth century: a biographical dictionary with annotated bibliography . 3. Edition. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1991, ISBN 0-262-65038-X , p. 110 f.
Laura Bates : Where are all the women, Wikipedia? , in: The Guardian, September 9, 2016

Web links

personal data
SURNAME	Knight, Margaret E.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Knight, Margaret Ethridge
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American inventor
DATE OF BIRTH	February 14, 1838
PLACE OF BIRTH	York , Maine
DATE OF DEATH	October 12, 1914