INVENTOR UNITED STATESI sighed sometimes, because I was not like other girls; but wisely concluded that I couldn’t help it, and sought further consolation from my tools.
—MARGARET KNIGHT
The whirring and clicking of the machines hummed in Margaret’s ears, almost hypnotizing her as she worked. Suddenly, the loom next to hers began making strange noises and, before she could react, it went haywire! The heavy spindle flew off, and its steel-tipped needle plunged into her neighbor’s leg. Margaret stared in shock—blood was everywhere. The mill erupted in chaos that didn’t stop until the screaming girl was carted off to the hospital. When things calmed down and people went fearfully back to work, Margaret couldn’t get the image out of her mind. There had to be a way to automatically shut off a loom when it malfunctioned so the spindle wouldn’t fly off and injure the worker. But how?
It’s a wonder that twelve-year-old Margaret ever solved this riddle. She lived in a time when a woman was more likely to sprout wings than become an inventor. Victorian girls were raised to be good wives and mothers, nothing more. They were taught to bake, sew, and clean house rather than work with tools and other so-called manly interests. And yet, from her earliest memories, Margaret was obsessed with tools, machines, and how to build things. She described her unpopular interests:
As a child, I never cared for things that girls usually do; dolls never possessed any charms for me. I couldn’t see the sense of coddling bits of porcelain with senseless faces: the only things I wanted were a jack-knife, a gimlet, and pieces of wood.9
Margaret’s girlfriends in Springfield, Massachusetts, were appalled and called her a tomboy and worse. But she didn’t let them stop her creativity. The boys liked her just fine, and they came around constantly begging her to make things for them. She was famous in the neighborhood for the kites and sleds she built. She took a lot more pride in those than she did in her household chores.
Margaret’s family was poor, so she didn’t get much schooling and had to work in a cotton mill when she was young. But it was her work there that gave twelve-year-old Margaret the inspiration for her first invention. After the mill accident, she was consumed day and night until she figured out a way to shut off a malfunctioning loom. Her stop-motion device was immediately put to work at the cotton mill and then in mills all over America. A twelve-year-old’s invention saved countless lives.
At the paper bag company, Margaret and other women were paid a third less than men doing the same jobs because the owners thought a woman couldn’t take care of the machines!
Margaret didn’t earn any money for this invention, and she spent her teen years working in various mills, in photography and engraving studios, and even repairing houses. This didn’t leave much time for inventing, but Margaret constantly studied the tools and machinery she worked with, learning how they functioned and imagining how she might improve them. It was during these years that her inventions took shape in her head.
Americans recycle more than a billion paper grocery bags every year! These bags are made from a kind of paper called Kraft, a German word meaning “strength.” You can reuse them many times.
Her most famous invention came to her while working at the Columbia Paper Bag Company. At the time, paper bags had to be glued together by hand. They were envelope-shaped and flimsy, usually falling apart before people could get their groceries home. Margaret devised a machine that could cut, fold, and paste the bags together without human labor. The bags it made were strong and flat-bottomed, like our grocery bags today.
She made thousands of trial bags on a wooden model before deciding to patent her invention. A patent is a document that proves a person invented something, and it would give Margaret the right to sell her idea or let others use it for a fee. Patents are how inventors make money for their ideas. Although Margaret had been inventing her entire life, she was thirty years old when she applied for her first patent. She knew her wooden model wouldn’t do for the patent office, so she took it to a shop to have an iron one built. When it was finished and she applied for her patent, Margaret got the shock of her life.
A certain Charles Annan beat her to it. He’d already applied for a patent on a bag-making machine that looked just like hers! It turns out he’d studied her model while it was in the shop. Even though he admitted to spying, Annan claimed that he had the idea first and that no woman could possibly understand the mechanical complexities of such a machine. Margaret was outraged.
Although she knew it would be an uphill battle to fight male prejudice, she had put too much work into her invention to just give up. She scraped together all her money and paid a lawyer one hundred dollars a day to help her fight for what was hers. They called witnesses—her boss at the bag factory, the machinist who built her iron model, her roommate—who all testified that Margaret had been working on the machine years before Annan.
Margaret herself defended her mechanical abilities, “I have from my earliest recollection been connected in some way with machinery.” She showed the court early sketches, notes, and photos, and she even let the judge read her diary, which was full of dreams about her precious bag machine! The judge and jury were overwhelmed with evidence that Margaret was no average lady. She won her case and her patent.
Victory was sweet, not just because Margaret had proved that a woman could invent an incredibly complex machine, but also because it was worth a fortune! She got her machines built and formed the Eastern Paper Bag Company to produce her bags. And unlike many inventors, Margaret enjoyed the fruits of her inventing success during her lifetime. Her invention earned her extraordinary attention (it could do the work of thirty people!), around fifty thousand dollars, and a medal from Queen Victoria!
Even though Margaret had little schooling, she taught herself everything she needed to know about patent law, contract negotiating, and licensing. It was a good thing too, because over the next forty-five years, she came up with almost ninety more inventions. She patented about twenty-five of them, including new shoe-cutting machines, window sashes, rotary engines, and motors for cars. She spent almost every day in what she called her experiment rooms until she died at seventy-six. In the last year of her life, a New York Times article described her continued creativity and stamina: “Miss Margaret Knight . . . is working twenty hours a day on her eighty-ninth invention.”
Margaret was one of the most productive female inventors ever. Her fame made her a role model for other female inventors to follow in her footsteps. She was not only a brilliant inventor but also a shrewd businesswoman and a real fighter when it came to protecting her ideas. Margaret never let people’s prejudices about women stop her from doing what she loved—figuring out ways to make things better—and she never let anyone else take credit for her ideas! In 2006 she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.