1838-1914

American Inventor

As a woman and an inventor, Margaret Knight is significant due to the number of inventions she produced and for the number of patents she received during her lifetime. Her most notable work was her development of the first machine capable of making square-bottomed paper bags.

Margaret Knight was born in York, Maine, on February 14, 1838. Mattie, as her parents and friends called her, had woodworking tools as favorite toys, which she enjoyed putting to use to make things. She later said of her childhood, "the only things I wanted were a jack knife, a gimlet (a tool for boring holes) and pieces of wood." She received some education through secondary school but no formal education beyond this. As a child and an adult, Knight used her creative mind and her interest in mechanical things to produce many inventions.

Knight's family moved...