The bag tips over and everything is on the floor

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.