The Inventive Mind of Margaret E. Knight

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So today we are going to talk about a person who has been on my radar for a while. She kicked up to the top recently because she has shown up on a lot of posts and reels about women the inventors for Women's History Month, and particularly one of them. There was a very well intentioned person making this reel, trying to call out that we don't acknowledge all the contributions of women, but they used the same image for her that is misused almost ever reware and places that you would think would know, we would know. Yeah, it cannot be her because of timing. The woman in that picture is wearing clothes that would not have existed until decades after Mark Knight's death. We could talk a little bit more about this on Friday. I really wanted to talk about her, and it was a good reminder that we haven't. Because Margaret E. Knight was a pretty ingenious lady. She started tinkering with things when she was still really just a little kid, and the first invention that really improved the lives of those around her that she came up with happened when she was the ripe old age of twelve years old, in what to me sounds kind of like a heartbreaking situation that inspired her. But she is primarily known today for one admittedly important invention, but she created a lot more things than that for her entire life. So I just thought she was due for her moment, so we're going to talk about her today. Margaret Eloise Knight was born February fourteenth, eighteen thirty eight, in York, Maine. Her parents were James and Hannah Teal Knight, and she had two older brothers named Charlie and Jim. Margaret by Mattie, and she showed a lot of ingenuity from a very young age. She wasn't particularly interested in playing with things like dolls, but she was interested in toys and made them for her brothers. She also made them kites and sleds, and apparently hers were very good. According to historian Henry Petrotski in an article for American Scholar in two thousand and three, a lot of other kids were envious of her creations. Yeah, he got that information from a quote by her which we'll have later. And when Margaret was still very very young, her father James died and this left the family with some pretty serious financial difficulties. So her mother moved the family to Manchester, New Hampshire, where there was a lot of millwork to be had, and initially Hannah and Mattie's two older brothers went to work to keep the family afloat, and then Mattie started working full time in a cotton mill when she was just twelve years old. So a quick textile brief. If you look at a cut of wove fabric off of a bolt, you'll see that the sides of the fabric are finished, there's not a raw edge, and that's because on a loom there are threads that run vertically, which are called the warp, and then threads that run horizontally called the weft. The weft threads are woven in and out of the warp threads, and those warp threads are held tight on the loom, so that woven thread rounds the last thread and then makes a return trip back across the loom in the opposite direction. That's how you have edges that are already finished off and it's why there's no threads hanging off the edge of the fabric. In the late seventeen hundreds and early eighteen hundreds, the power loom was developed, and they still had to be worked by a machinist, but that person was throwing a lever to make each pass of the weft thread back and forth instead of manually passing it back and forth using a needle or some other tool. So, again, this is about woven fabric. Knits are a bit different, and there are still people who weave by hand. Obviously, we were talking about industrial weaving, and mill looms were dangerous because those shuttles which carried the weft threads that ran across the loom back and forth had steel tips, and if there was even a small error in handling them, or if the thread they were carrying broke, those heavy shuttles with a steel tip could shoot out of the machine and hit workers like a projectile. And apparently Mattie saw this happen at least once, where one of the other workers on the line with her was very seriously injured. The specifics of that injury don't really ever come up. I read one that suggested that somebody lost their eye, or that it was even worse than that. But I feel like we don't have any evidence as to the actual thing that happened. She probably saw something like this happen more than once, though it may not have always been that critical in its injury. But she immediately saw the problem that was going on with these shuttles, so at the age of twelve, she started working on a way to prevent such accidents. Soon, just within a few weeks, she'd come up with a restraining device for the shuttles, and it did exactly what it was supposed to do. It kept the shuttle from popping off of the loom in an unpredictable and fast trajectory. And of course, this was a valuable advancement for cotton mills, and Maddie's invention was quickly implemented, Its use started to spread, and soon it was being used in mills all over Manchester. In an ideal world, this would have led to Maddie being compensated for what she'd invented. She had absolutely cut a lot of costs and saved workers from injury, but she was twelve, not from a wealthy or business savvy family. She did not know she had an invention that she could have patented. She kept working in the mill with improved safety, but no financial gain from her invention. Yeah, I mean the upside because it was never patented, it got to be implemented in a lot of other places very quickly without having to go through patent licensing. So she probably saved a lot of lives as a consequence, or at least a lot of people from injury. But she should have been compensated. Unfortunately, though, because there was no patent filed for Knight's invention, we actually today don't exactly know how it worked. Historians kind of debate over what it was. The two most obvious possibilities are that it was either one some sort of physical apparatus that actually blocked the shuttle so it could not pop out of the loom, or to a mechanism that caused the power loom to shut down or just stop if there was a thread error. A New York Times write up about Night from nineteen thirteen referred to this invention as a quote covered shuttle, and that suggests either the first of those two possibilities, or even possibly a third completely different design that may have just rendered the shuttle mechanism less dangerous if it were to leave the loom like it may have had something that covered that steel tip and made it a little bit softer and less dangerous. When she was in her late teens, Maddie left the mill. That may have been because of an issue with her health that kept her from continuing to work in the mill. She took a lot of odd jobs and other temporary work for a while. Later, she credited this with giving her a deeper understanding of how a lot of different mechanical things worked. She spent time working in engraving shops with photography equipment, and upholstery. For a while, she even worked in a business that specialized in home repairs. Yeah, I feel like even though she had very little formal education, she got so much practical knowledge, and she absorbed so much from everything she did that it kind of makes sense that she was quite ingenious and able to apply that information. Following the US Civil War in eighteen sixty seven, Mattie moved away from the family and she found work in Springfield, Massachusetts, at the Columbia Paper Bag Company. A year into her work there, at the age of thirty, she started on a new project. Just as she had innovated the shuttle restraint for looms, Mattie once again came up with a way to improve the work done on the factory floor. This wasn't so much about safety, but she spent a while tinkering with the way paper bags were made. So any paper bag starts with a flat sheet of paper, and it's then folded and usually glued to hold its shape, and in the eighteen sixties this created a paper bag that was flat with one end folded and sealed, so it looked very much like a big Manilla envelope. These kinds of bags flat bags still exist today. Of course, you see them in places like card shops all the time, but they were not and are not ideal for every situation. They weren't even the only kind of paper bag. People knew how to fold bags that had flat bottoms, but no one had figured out a way for a machine to make a flat bottomed bag. They all had to be done by hand. So obviously, anyone who's ever had takeout, or if you've carried groceries or any other purchase, knows how much of a game changer this would have been. Think of every time you get a flat bottom shopping bag. And if someone had handed you a bag that was flat across and didn't have that stable bottom on it, how much more of a pain in the neck it would be to carry things. Margaret, though, thought more of the bag folding process could be automated, so she started working on a machine that would pull in the paper, cut it to the shape that was needed, and folded. The pneumatic paper feeding part of this invention was patented in eighteen seventy as an improvement in paper feeding machines that on its own was impressive. But Night continued her work on paper feeders and automated bag folding, and in a move that would cement her place among important inventors, she also changed the shape of the bag that a machine could make, so she created a machine that could produce a bag with a flat, square bottom. So the function of this machine was described by Petroski in that article that we mentioned earlier, and it was described as follows quote. Knight's machine worked by pulling from a roll of paper stock a sheet that it immediately started to form into a tube. Paste was applied where one side of the paper overlapped the other, thus completing the tube. Knight's machine performed its greatest magic by shaping the end of the tube into a flat bottom by means of a series of three folds, and the drawings that delineate the three step mechanical folding process look like instructions for industrial or agami. The first fold formed the end of the tube into a slit diamond, the second creased one tip of the diamond over to make a pentagon, and the third creased the other tip over to form an elongated hexagon. With the proper pasting taking place simultaneously with the folding, the closed bottom was formed quickly. The bag was completed by being severed from the continuously forming tube, at which point the cycle was repeated. Also, just as a side note in case you're trying to make this picture in your head, this bag did not have the fold in sides that we would associate with like a paper grocery bag today that let you easily flatten a bag for storage. That particular change to bags was invented in eighteen seventy two and is attributed to a man named Luther Crowell. Coming up, we will talk about how a jerk tried to steal Margaret's invention. Before we do, though, we will hear from some of the sponsors that keep Stuffy Miss in history Glass going. This whole process of developing this machine that could fold a flat bottom bag had taken a long time. At one point, Margaret has said to have spent so much of her time watching the machines at the Columbia paper bag company where she worked that her boss got irritated and thought she was wasting time. But she told him what she was doing and what she was working on, and surprisingly and delightfully he supported it. Mattie was really methodical about how she wanted to move forward with this new invention. She had created a prototype machine out of wood, and once she was confident that all of the mechanisms that she had designed worked consistently, she reached out to a machinist to make an iron version that would actually be valuable in a factory setting. She wanted to make sure that when she applied for her patent, she had a sturdy and functional version of this bag holder to really ensure that her patent request would be approved. So at this point, Knight had achieved a level of savvy regarding her inventions and their value, but she hadn't really considered that once she shared this design, somebody else might try to claim it as their own, and that's exactly what happened. While her design was being produced by a Boston metalworker, a man named Charles f Annon saw it, and he quickly submitted a patent application for it in his own name. To be clear, this was not the machinist she had hired to do this work. According to one version of the story, it was another one of his clients who happen to spot it while visiting the shop. Annon is said to have returned to the shop several times after initially seeing Knight's bag machines, so that he could surreptitiously get more information about it. There's also a version of the story that says that Annon was also a machinist who worked with the one that Margaret hired. It's really not clear whether which of these two things is true, if either of them. Whatever it was, though, he stole her work and Mattie discovered Annon's theft of her idea when she tried to submit her own patent application and she was informed that the device she was filing a patent for was already under application by Charles Annon. She knew that he had used her designs and so she sued him. This was not a small move on her part. She is said to have paid a great deal of money in legal costs by the time everything was over. That amount is reported differently. In some it's listed as one hundred dollars, in some it's one hundred dollars a day. And this hearing took sixteen days, that would have been sixteen hundred dollars, which was a lot of money at the time. But regardless however much she spent, it was worth it because when it came time for the hearing, Maddie showed up ready to describe every single piece of the machinery in question in detail. She had a raft of physical evidence to support her claim, including her sketches and her notes on the invention, information about her prototype, as well as entries in her diaries about her work. She also had her boss and landlady come in as witnesses to corroborate that, yes, she worked with machinery all the time and knew what she was doing and had been working on this very project. On the other hand, Annan showed up with nothing but the claim that a woman simply could not understand machinery like his alleged invention. But it was so evident to the courts that Margaret knew exactly what she was talking about, and she won the case, so she was able to go ahead with her patent application and Annon's was withdrawn. The writing of knights patent is very smart. It makes it clear that this is just one way that the mechan is works, and that she's patenting not the machine exactly, but the mode of operation. This meant somebody else could not change one little part of it and claim that as an improvement. Her application concludes with quote, I wish to have it understood that, believing myself to be the first to invent a device to hold or push back a point or portion of one edge of the paper tube while the blade or tucking knife forms the first fold represented in Fig. Ten, which is the basis of the flat bottom bag, I do not confine myself to any particular form, position, or mode of attaching the device referred to which I have designated a guide finger, nor limit myself to making it fixed or movable, as long as it performs the function for which I have devised and used it. I have made it in various forms and fixed as well as movable and having a rear word projection like a heel. The guide finger here and before described I believe to be the best form, but other forms will end her with the necessary modifications of the accompanying mechanism without altering the principle of operation by which the fold represented in figure ten four. I love that she was smart enough to do that, like don't be coming along with your with your eye moved the folding arm, and like claim you changed my machine. The patent for her bag machine, which was all it was called, was granted on July eleventh, eighteen seventy one, and once Night had her patent in hand, she needed capital if she was going to get a manufacturing process for the invention up and running. She found a business partner in Newton, Massachusetts who could finance her efforts, and she co founded the Eastern Paper Bag Company. As part of the founding of the new company, which was based in Hartford, Connecticut, Maddie got an initial payout of twenty five hundred dollars. She also got stock in the company, and she collected royalties on sales, which were capped at twenty five thousand dollars. So this was lucrative at the time, and it probably like an awful lot of money to Margaret, but it was a little bit shortsighted because once again Night had perhaps not considered all of the variables in the situation, and in this case, she didn't build in ongoing income for herself from the company long term. She knew that she didn't want to run a factory. She had no interest in being a manager, so she wasn't collecting any kind of salary, and those royalties, like we said, were capped. It took a while for things to get up and running. Of course. On October seventeenth, eighteen seventy three, the Boston Evening Transcript ran a single sentence update that signaled that things were about to get up and running on that bag production front. It read, quote, the Aims Manufacturing Company have just finished the paper bag machine, the invention of Miss Margaret E. Knight of Ingleside. Yeah, so that was presumably the company that was actually making all of these multiple production machines at scale so that an actual factory could begin. And once this was all up and running, that new machine was a marvel for paper bag companies, it meant that they had a much faster way to produce stock than having employees handfold flat bottom bags, so they had a vastly enlarged revenue stream. For grocers and shops, and easier means of carrying purchases home meant that shoppers were willing to buy more things, and for department stores, it meant that clerks didn't need to wrap goods for customers and tie them with twine. I read one thing that said that Macy's was very quick to adopt this because they were like time savor. The global impact of Margaret Knight's invention was so great that she was given a decoration of the Royal Legion of Honor by Queen Victoria. Margaret was interviewed about her work for Women's Journal in eighteen seventy two. That article opened by explaining that initially, as the machines are being manufactured quote, the workmen employed were at first skeptical, but she cured them of this by going daily and working among them, detecting mistakes and improving plans with a keener eye than any man in the works. And when questioned about her desire to work with machinery, from a young age. Margaret said, quote, it is only following out nature. 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 jackknife, a gimlet, and pieces of wood. I sighed sometimes because I was not like the other girls, but wisely concluded that I could not help it, and sought further consolation from my tools. I would always make things for my brothers. Did they want anything in the line of playthings, they always said, Mattie will make them for us. I'm not surprised at what I've done. I'm only sorry I couldn't have had as good a chance as a boy and have been put to my trade regularly. That write up concludes by saying about Mattie quote, she can no more help making machinery than Anna Dickinson can help making speeches. Following the launch of the Eastern paper Bag Company, Knight decided she was going to be an inventor full time. She kept an office in Boston and lived outside the city, first in Ashland, Massachusetts, which is about twenty eight miles west of Boston. Been in Framingham, which is a little bit closer to Boston proper, at about twenty two miles west of the city. Margaret did not abandon the paper bag making business. She continued to work on improvements to the machine's process. In eighteen seventy nine, she was granted patent number twenty two nine to two five for an updated version of her bag machine. This update made changes to the folding blade and the feeding blade to make the machine more reliable and even faster, and the model that was submitted with that patent request is now part of the collection of the National Museum of American History. Coming up, we will talk about some of Maddie's other inventions, but first we will pause for a sponsor break. There's a bag folder is Margaret Knight's most talked about invention. It's just one of many she ventured into a lot of new areas. In eighteen eighty three, she was granted a patent for a skirt protector. This was essentially a raincoat to go over the large, bustled and draped skirts of the day. It kind of like was a raincoat that went from the waist down, and the intention was to keep fine fabrics from being damaged by inclement weather. Knight described her invention to me somewhat quaintly as quote a shield which is capable of being expanded to nearly a flat position for the reception of the skirts, and then of being closed and held upon the latter while being worn. In eighteen eighty four, she was granted a patent for a new type of clasp. The invention was, in the words of Knight's patent application, quote an improved device for clasping one or more thicknesses of robes or textile fabric for the purpose of holding the same in any required position, either as a detached clasp for uniting the otherwise the edges of said robe or sheet of fabric, or as a means of attachment from the end of a flexible connection to a fixed point, or from said connection provided with means for securing its other end. The illustration for this clasp and the document is sort of fabulous that shows the clasp being used to secure a blanket over the lap of a man driving a carriage, and the clasp itself is really interesting. It uses two circular spring loaded ends of a tethered mechanism, and then they nestle inside one another. Once the fabric is situated on top of one circular loop of the clasp, the other one can be reduced in size enough to fit over the fabric and then inside of the other circular loop. Once the spring is released, the nestled loop opens up wide enough that it can't pass back through the other one. So think of this sort of as like an embroidery hoop, if the smaller hoop was intended to pass entirely through the larger one and then expand out to the same size, so catching the fabric in between them. I really really love this illustration because not only does it show the man driving his carriage with his blanket clasped on either side with this, but like it even has like the horse hoofs drawn in with like clouds of dust like pigpen around it. It's really really fun. Another area of interest for Margaret was the manufacture of shoes. In eighteen ninety, she was granted a patent for a sole cutting machine, and this was a design that carried sheets of rubber along a conveyor belt that quote intermittently moves horizontally beneath a pattern and cutting device which have a vertical reciprocating movement and intermittently descend. Clamp the material upon the apron and cut out a complete sole upon each of the tablets or beds while it is at rest, and then once a shoe sole was cut, the belt would just move along and take away the shoe sole and the waist rubber. At the end of the nineteenth century, Margaret turned her attention to steam engines and Janey Wary of nineteen oh three, she was granted a patent on her rotary engine. She explained its function as follows quote. The improvements relate particularly to the construction and arrangement of pistons and their abutments for rotary engines, either single acting or compound, and the combination of two or more pistons in a manner to obviate vibration of the engine when in operation. And the invention consists in hanging a plurality of pistons upon bearings eccentric to the center of the piston chamber. When two pistons are used, they are arranged with their eccentricity diametrically opposite to each other, and when three are used. The two end pistons are hung with the eccentricity diametrically opposed to the middle position, and the steam pressure area of the middle piston and its centrifugal force when in motion should be substantially equal to that of the two end pistons. The invention further consists in making the so called steam abutment of a plate of metal and attaching its upper edge securely to the engine casting above the cylinder, while the lower edge projects downward into a slot formed in each piston, in which it slides as the pistons revolve around their eccentric bearings about the engine shaft. This engine was intended to run things like the various machines she had invented in her career. Yeah, so, taking away less of a need for mill workers and enabling them to have just an easier time of running the various machines that she had created. In nineteen thirteen, an article that was titled Women who are Inventors appeared in the New York Times, and although it covered the achievements of multiple women, Night was important enough that the subtitle called out only her by name, reading, Miss Margaret E. Knight is now at work on her eighty ninth invention, and other women who have shown inventive genius. The section from the article that's about Margaret opens with quote, the oldest of them and the one having the most to her credit, is Miss Margaret E. Knight, who, at the age of seventy is working twenty hours a day on her eighty ninth invention. And it goes on to tell the story of her early cotton mill days and how her bag folding machine brought her accolades from the British crown. As Night's name became synonymous with invention, it was also increasingly associated with something else entirely, and that was the early women's equality movement. As the nineteenth century came to a close in the twentieth century began, Margaret's name was frequently invoked in articles that showcased the accomplishments of women as a way to make the case for equality. Based on her eighteen seventy two article quote we mentioned earlier, it's clear that she felt that women and girls should be given the same opportunities as men. Obviously, the time when that binary structure was the only way that those kinds of discussions were really framed but none of the later articles that used her as an example of the ingenuity of women were at her and they didn't include quotes from her, so we don't really know how she felt about it. Yeah, her actual thoughts on the movement itself are kind of a mystery. On October twelfth, nineteen fourteen, Margaret died at the age of seventy eight in Framingham Hospital. Her obituary mentioned that her death came quote following an illness of several weeks of a complication of diseases, which is pretty nebulous. We don't really know the cause of death. She had been working right up to the end of her life, continuing to spend long hours in her workshop, which seemed to be exactly where she wanted to be. When Margaret Knight died, her obituaries honored her achievements, but they've also caused some problems in terms of the historical record. For one, a lot of them claim she was the first woman to receive a US patent, and this is untrue. Although she may have been the first woman to have her portrait exhibited in the US Patent Office, do we have this portrait? We do not, Okay, that's why it's maybe people have referenced it in other writings, but I don't know. Yeah, I had this moment of like, why don't we know what it looks like. Some obituaries stated that she held eighty seven patents, which is also untrue, although she probably had that many inventions under her belt, just not necessarily patenting all of them. What's true is that at the end of her life Margaret Knight held twenty seven patents. She had changed the retail world with her bag folder when she was barely in her thirties, and she made a life for herself working solely as an inventor when that was really a career path that was almost unheard of for a woman. She is often noted as having died with less than three hundred dollars to her name, as sort of a sad coda to her life story, like, oh, she died destitute, but in nineteen fourteen, that wasn't exactly living destitute. By relative worth calculations, it would have been more than nine thousand dollars today. So she didn't have a huge fortune. No, but she was, and she had supported herself by patenting her inventions and then selling those patents and then being paid royalties on their use. She never married or had children, so she didn't need to leave a financial legacy to support anybody else. For someone who had started life incredibly poor and had had to work a full time job as a child just so her family could eat, you didn't make the cases. She had really achieved quite a lot in being financially independent and just able to live as she wished. In two thousand and six, Margaret Knight was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. I wish I knew more about her personality. That's my family. We don't have a lot of that. Yeah. I have such a fun listener mail. Oh good, oh, I love this one. This is from our listener Liz, who says I made my family go see the Amazon Rainforest carousel at the Philadelphia Zoo and also the animals. Liz writes, Hi, Holly and Tracy. Recently some friends of me and my husban been reminded us that we could still be social in the winter. We agreed and set a date to bring our kids up to visit, with no particular plan in place. Then I listened to an older Saturday classic, The History of carousels, and these friends live near Philadelphia, so naturally I texted them immediately and said, we're going to the zoo. We packed up our car and our three kids, all under three, and drove two hours from Central Pennsylvania to Philadelphia. I told the kids it was to see the zoo. It kind of was, but it was to see the carousel. The zoo itself is an interesting place. They're very proud of the fact that they are considered the first zoo in the US. There are parts that definitely feel older and definitely more like people were guessing what animals needed, which I guess they were. There are different kinds of really cool birds where there might have been larger animals one hundred years ago. I'm sure if I really wanted to, I could look into that more, but I think it would just make me sad. Way, do I understand that sentiment. I've attached pictures for tax I took a lot of pictures of the carousel while also trying to hold one of my kiddos for safety. The rest are some of the animals we saw, though many were inside because it was cold. I do love that the zoo celebrated the snapping turtle's birthday by putting stickers up. I guess he doesn't move that much because those stickers were on the outside of the tank. They had four Galapagos tortoises, but this big boy pictured was huge. Sorry for the long email, but I just wanted to share how fun it was to bring my family to a piece of history I only knew about because the pod. I love the pod and the knowledge and perspective you guys bring. I'm eager to share it with my kiddos when they're a bit older. Right now, it's wheels on the bus or bust. I'm afraid it was a long two hour drive, Liz, I love everything about this email. One. I just love that you were like, we're going to see that carousel. Two the pictures of this carousel are so beautiful. By the way, to explain the reference of the tortoise and the stickers, they put up like stickers that look like a birthday hat and a gift, And if the tortoise is standing in just the right position, it looks like he's wearing the hat and the gift. And apparently he moves so little that it was safe to put up stationary stickers that he will often look like he is wearing the hat and receiving the gift, which I love. This carousel is so beautiful and I have honestly not seen very many pictures of it, so this was a real treat. Like you can see clearly that there's like a beautiful snake carved into it in one place, and like there are there's so much foliage, and there are paintings of animals, and it's just a really, really beautiful thing. And I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that you took the time to take all of these photographs and share them with us, as well as sharing some very cute animals from the zoo. I'm still laughing about the tortoise because he really does look very funny. There's a great rhino picture. I love a rhinosiris, and of course one of the best of the wild animals, the red panda, which I think everyone wishes we could all just have one as a pet, right we all wish that. No, this is absolutely gorgeous, and I love that you are going on little history field trips. It makes me so happy in my dark little heart. So thank you, thank you, thank you for sending us this email. If you would like to write to us, you can do so at History Podcast at iHeartRadio. You can also find us on social media as missed in History and if you have not yet subscribed to the podcast and want to so you don't miss out on a single new or old episode as we release classics and maybe get inspired to go travel somewhere, you could do that on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Stuff you Missed in History class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,