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# The bag tips over and everything is on the floor
- URL: https://www.thefrictionlog.com/04600/
- Published: 2026-09-22T18:54:10.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-12T15:14:57.000Z
- Description: Filed: 1852 · Solved: 1871 · the flat-bottomed paper bag · by Margaret Knight, bag-factory worker
- Author: The Clerk
- Tags: Solved, #solved 1871

*Set the groceries down to open the gate. Now the eggs are in the flour.* — Housekeeper, 1860

Paper bags used to be shaped like envelopes, which is fine for a letter and no good for eggs. Margaret Knight, who worked in a Massachusetts bag factory, built a machine that folded a flat bottom into them. A man who saw it in a Boston machine shop tried to patent it as his own, then argued a woman couldn't understand a machine like that. She brought her drawings and won. Hard to argue with the person who drew it.

**Still bugs us**: the plastic grocery bag, which tips over in the trunk on the first turn.

### The full file

She started young. Knight left school and went to work in a cotton mill at 12\. After she saw co-workers get hurt, she came up with a guard for the looms, and before she was out of her teens it was in use around the country.

Once she won the bag patent, she went into business, co-founding the Eastern Paper Bag Company in Hartford, Connecticut.

She didn't stop at bags. By the time she died in 1914 she had more than 25 patents, from a window frame and sash to machinery for cutting shoe soles and a rotary engine. A woman couldn't understand a machine, the man said. More than twenty-five patents.

**Relates to** [No. 06400](https://www.thefrictionlog.com/06400/).