Margaret Eloise Knight was an American inventor, notably of the flat-bottomed paper bag. She has been called "the most famous 19th-century woman inventor". She was working in a paper-bag factory when she devised a new way to put together the bags.Knight was born on February 14, 1838, in York, Maine to James Knight and Hannah Teal. After her father died when she was young, Knight's family moved to Manchester, New Hampshire. She received a basic education, but left school with her siblings to work at a cotton mill. At the age of 12, Knight witnessed an accident at the mill where 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 that was later adopted by other Manchester mills. The device was never patented and the exact nature of it 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 home repair, photography, and engraving.
