Margaret E . Knight was born in York , Maine in1838 . Margaret was very interested in tools and machinery even as a young child . Woman in that period were not considered to be mechanically inclined or to be interested in machinery . Children especially were not thought to be creative enough to invent things Margaret , however , began inventing things at a young age and had her first success very early in life . She witnessed a horrible accident at the cotton mill where she and her brothers worked . Many people had tried over the years to make the looms safer for the workers but no one had come up with an idea that worked . Margaret spend hours and hours creating a safer design for the loom piece in question and at the tender age of 12 she had her first working invention . …show more content…
bags at that time were envelope shaped and held closed by having twine or string wrapped around them . Square bottom bags were rarely used because they had to be made by hand and were very expensive . Margaret decided that there was definitely room for improvement and set about trying to create a machine that would cut fold and paste square bottoms bags by itself . This would make the bags much less expensive to produce and do the work of many people with only one machine She worked days at the Columbia Bag Company and while she worked , she studied the machines that were in existence there already At night , she took her ideas home and spent hours building and rebuilding models of a machine she thought would create a better bag machine . It took a very long time and a massive amount of work to get what she wanted from the machine . She tested and adjusted and changed things in the plan until it was just what she wanted Once the design of the machine was perfect , she hired someone to make the actual machine for her