Margaret E. Knight (The Lady-Edison)

Known as the Woman Edison, Margaret E. Knight was an American Inventor who created over 90 inventions in her career.

Over time Margaret developed a name for herself World-wide as The Most Famous 19th Century Woman Inventor. She was born on February 19th 1838 in a place called York, Maine. Her parents were: James Knight and Hannah Teal.

Margaret was always into working with her hands and preferred using tools over dolls and other toys. She once mentioned that her actual desired toys were a a jack-knife, a gimlet and pieces of wood. Many of her neighbours and childhood friends said she built items such as kites, and even sleds for her brothers.

Sadly, her father passed away when she was young and her family had to move to New Hampshire where her mother worked in a cotton mill. After her fathers passing, they became very poor. Her mother was so impoverished that Margaret had to leave her education when she was only twelve years old and work in the mills with her mam and siblings.

The Industrial Spark (Age 12)

One day in 1850, M.E. Knight brought lunch to her brothers who were working in Amoskeag Manufacturing Company. While present on site, Margaret bare witness to a terrible accident where a stell-tipped shuttle flew off a loom and injured a worker very badly. However, Margaret herself designed a shuttle-restraining safety device within a matter of week. This device automatically ensured the same incident wouldn’t re-occur ever again if the shuttle malfunctioned. Even though she wasn’t patented because she was below working age and also a lack of legal knowledge, her invention was placed into many mills across the country.

Career and Diverse Inventions

Knight’s career was very varied and she held between 29 and 30 patents and invented an estimated 90 different things.

Some of her inventions are as follows:

• Flat-bottomed Paper Bag Machine (1868) – This was her most famous invention which cut, folded, glued paper into square bottomed paper bags
• Shoe-making – Sole Cutting Machines (1890s) – She received six patents for a variety of machines she invented that cut leather and rubber with extreme precision.
• Automotive – Rotary Engines & Sleeve Valve Motors (1900s) – She designed engine parts that were advanced and used in high-end cars and other motor vehicles. She even founded the Knight-Davidson Motor Company
• Household – Dress and Skirt Shield (1883) A protective lining for women’s fashion. Robe Clasp(1884): A fastener for robes/fabrics and Barbecue Spit (1885) a rotating tool for cooking meat.
• Industrial – A Window Frame and Sash (1894): a design allowing sashes to swing horizontally to make cleaning easier.
• – Numbering Mechanism (1884) For stamping numbers on boots and shoes.

The Lady-Edison Legacy

In 1871, Margaret E. Knight became a revolutionary for intellectual property rights. She did this by winning a landmark patent during an interference lawsuit agains a man named Charles Annan who had tried to steal her paper bag machine design. He did this while her iron model was being built.

The legal victory in 1871 over Charles F. Annan was a turning point in the history of intellectual property. It stands as the first time in U.S history that a woman won a patent interference lawsuit.

The Theft of the Invention

While she was working at Columbia Paper Bag Company in 1867, Knight worked for two years developing a wooden prototype for her flat-bottomed paper bag machine. She required a functional iron model in order to secure a patent which she asked for at a machine shop in Boston, America. Charles Annan was a machinist at the shop and surreptitiously studied her design and created his own version of the invention. When knight went to apply for her patent, she uncovered Annan’s fraud and she initiated the lawsuit.

The Courtroom Battle

The court case lasted for sixteen days with intense testimony in Washington D.C. Annan’s defense seriously lacked any documentation and he relied completely on the era’s prejudices. His argument “a woman could not possibly understand the mechanical complexities of the machine and so could not have invented it.”

Unfortunately for Annan, Margaret Knight arrived prepared with all of her journals, diagrams and notes she wrote while forming the prototype of the machine. She had meticulous hand-drawn blueprint diagrams of the machines evolution since 1867 and also her physical rickety wooden model and variety of patterns she used during the development of her invention.

Witness Testimony

Knight asked her landlady, her previous employers and other machinists she had worked with who all testified that they had witness her creating drawings and working on models well before Annan’s application for patent.

The Verdict and Impact

Knight’s full preparation was extremely thorough that it is reported that she challenged the judge in court with the question: “which part confuses you-the evidence, or your assumptions?”

The court ruled in her favor and she was officially awarded Patent No. 116,842 on July 11th 1871. However, she forked out over $2,500 in todays money to pay legal fees which was a huge risk for someone of her modest means. Despite this, her win in court against Annan proved that technical expertise and detailed documentation could in fact successfully dismantle gender bias that was systemic in the court of law.

Afterwards, she co-founded the Eastern Paper Bag Company but her main income came from royalties of her inventions. She was known to prefer being in a laboratory than sitting in meetings in a boardroom.

Many years later, it was reported to The New York Times that she was working over twenty hours a day on her 89th invention. She never married or had children, which, in my opinion, is not a tragedy. It is infact a sign of a woman who knows what she wants and gets it. That’s not to say that women who marry and have children is a tragedy. Far from it. I think many women get married and have children do so because its what they either, want right away or gradually realise (with the rise of the biological clock) that its something they would like to do.

Margaret E. Knight passed away on October 12 1914 when she was seventy six years old in Framingham, Massachusetts with an estate valued al less than $300 at the time of her death. This was despite her huge impact on modern commerce of the era she lived in.