Machines for producing these envelope-style bags were the subject of three patents issued to Francis Wolle in 1852, 1855, and 1858. They were also poorly suited to bulky items, such as groceries and hardware goods. She noticed that the envelope-shaped machine-made paper bags they produced were weak and narrow, and could not stand on their bases. Knight moved to Springfield, Massachusetts in 1867 and was hired by the Columbia Paper Bag Company. Knight is clearly identified in this patent. At the time, many female inventors and writers concealed their gender by using only an initial instead of their given name, but Margaret E. Knight's first patent, issued in 1870, was for an 'improvement in paper-feeding machines', a 'pneumatic paper-feeder' with applications in printing presses and paper-folding machines her paper bag machine would feature a three-step folding process in forming the flat bottom. In her teens and early 20s she held several jobs, including in home repair, daguerreotype photography, engraving, and furniture upholstery.

Health problems precluded Knight from continuing to work at the cotton mill. The device was never patented and its exact nature is unknown, though it may have been either a device to stop the loom when the shuttle thread broke or a guard to physically block a flying shuttle. Within weeks she invented a safety device for the loom, which was later adopted by other Manchester mills. ġ2-year-old Knight witnessed an accident at the mill in which a worker was stabbed by a steel-tipped shuttle that shot out of a mechanical loom. Any formal education she had was limited to secondary school, as she left to work in the mills at age 12 with her siblings. Knight and her brothers, Charlie and Jim, were raised by their widowed mother Knight's father died when she was young, after which the impoverished family moved to Manchester, New Hampshire, where employment was available in the cotton mills. As a little girl, “Mattie,” as her parents and friends nicknamed her, preferred to play with woodworking tools instead of dolls, stating that “the only things wanted were a jack knife, a gimlet, and pieces of wood.” She was known as a child for her kites and sleds. Knight was born in York, Maine on February 14, 1838, to Hannah Teal and James Knight. Knight received dozens of patents in different fields, and became a symbol for women's empowerment. She founded the Eastern Paper Bag Company in 1870, creating paper bags for groceries similar in form to the ones that would be used in later generations. She has been called 'the most famous 19th-century woman inventor'. Margaret Eloise Knight (Febru– Octo ) was an American inventor, notably of a machine to produce flat-bottomed paper bags. Machine to produce flat-bottomed paper bags

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