Margaret Eloise Knight (February 14, 1838 – October 12, 1914) was an American inventor, notably of a machine to produce flat-bottomed paper bags. She has been called "the most famous 19th-century woman inventor". 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. Knight received dozens of patents in different fields, and became a symbol for women's empowerment. Early life Margaret E. Knight was born in York, Maine on February 14, 1838, to Hannah Teal and James Knight. 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 [she] wanted were a jack knife, a gimlet, and pieces of wood.” She was known as a child for her kites and sleds. 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. Any formal education she had was limited to secondary school, as she left to work in the mills at age 12 with her siblings. 12-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. Within weeks she invented a safety device for the loom, which was later adopted by other Manchester mills. 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. Health problems precluded Knight from continuing to work at the cotton mill. In her teens and early 20s she held several jobs, including in home repair, daguerreotype photography, engraving, and furniture upholstery. Career 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. 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 is clearly identified in this patent. Flat-bottomed paper bag machine Knight moved to Springfield, Massachusetts in 1867