<v Speaker 1>Some inventions are so important, they just become part of

<v Speaker 1>our daily lives. Just another item on a long list

<v Speaker 1>of things we all take for granted every single day.

<v Speaker 1>But just because we don't think about them doesn't mean

<v Speaker 1>they're not useful. Stuff like cell phones, toilet paper, your toothbrush,

<v Speaker 1>or a grocery bag. Specifically, a paper bag. Brown paper

<v Speaker 1>that folds down flat when it's empty, and when you

<v Speaker 1>open it up, it has a flat square bottom So

<v Speaker 1>it stands by itself on the counter and you can

<v Speaker 1>load it full of groceries. Simple, ordinary, boring, utterly forgettable.

<v Speaker 1>Thing is, somebody had to invent that thing. And the

<v Speaker 1>ridiculous fight over who actually did invent it made it

<v Speaker 1>all the way to a courtroom. I'm Jerry Broadway. For

<v Speaker 1>Hey Dad Productions, this is Anonymous America. Her name was

<v Speaker 1>Margaret Knight, and she was born in Maine in 1838.

<v Speaker 1>And she was, even as a child, a builder. While

<v Speaker 1>other little girls were given dolls, young Maddie Knight wanted tools.

<v Speaker 1>She made sleds and kites for her brothers that were

<v Speaker 1>the envy of the neighborhood. She once said she never

<v Speaker 1>cared much for the things girls were supposed to care for.

<v Speaker 1>All she ever wanted was a jackknife, a piece of wood,

<v Speaker 1>and a problem to solve. She got her first big

<v Speaker 1>problem early, and it was a terrible one. Maddie went

<v Speaker 1>to work at a very young age in a cotton mill.

<v Speaker 1>And one day, standing on the factory floor, she watched

<v Speaker 1>as a steel-tipped shuttle flew loose from a machine and

<v Speaker 1>struck a worker in the face. It was just one

<v Speaker 1>of the everyday horrors of the cotton mills. Now, Maddie

<v Speaker 1>was around 12 years old at the time. And instead

<v Speaker 1>of simply being frightened by the incident, she went straight

<v Speaker 1>home and designed a safety device to stop it from

<v Speaker 1>ever happening again. It was a guard, a stop-motion mechanism,

<v Speaker 1>and mills all around the region adopted it. Did I

<v Speaker 1>mention she was 12 years old? And Maddie never really

<v Speaker 1>stopped after that. Over her lifetime, Margaret Knight would be

<v Speaker 1>credited with some 87 patents and nearly as many inventions. Engines, machines,

<v Speaker 1>mechanisms of every kind. But the one that sealed her

<v Speaker 1>place in history started when she was working at a

<v Speaker 1>company that made paper bags. Now, the paper bags of

<v Speaker 1>that day were flimsy, shaped like envelopes with no flat bottom.

<v Speaker 1>They were pretty much useless for carrying much of anything.

<v Speaker 1>And Margaret looked at the problem and saw the answer.

<v Speaker 1>A complicated automatic machine that would cut, fold, and glue

<v Speaker 1>paper into a bag with a flat square bottom. The

<v Speaker 1>very bag we still use today, if you can find one.

<v Speaker 1>She built a wooden working model and prepared to file

<v Speaker 1>for her patent. And that's where things got ugly. To

<v Speaker 1>make the final version of this machine, she brought her

<v Speaker 1>design to a machine shop. And there was a man

<v Speaker 1>there named Charles Annan. He took a good long look

<v Speaker 1>at what Margaret had built. And then he ran to

<v Speaker 1>the patent office and filed for the patent himself under

<v Speaker 1>his name as if he had invented it. Margaret Knight

<v Speaker 1>found out what he did and Margaret Knight sued. But

<v Speaker 1>once that suit was filed, Margaret learned very quickly that

<v Speaker 1>her back was against the wall. This was 1870. A

<v Speaker 1>woman challenging a man over a patent in a court

<v Speaker 1>of that era was unheard of. Truth be told, A

<v Speaker 1>woman challenging a man about pretty much anything in those

<v Speaker 1>days was unheard of. Now, when the case came before

<v Speaker 1>the patent authorities, Annan's defense was not that he had

<v Speaker 1>built the machine first. His defense, his actual argument, was

<v Speaker 1>that Margaret Knight could not have possibly designed something so complex.

<v Speaker 1>Because she's a woman. The intricacy of the machine proved

<v Speaker 1>a woman's hand could not have possibly made it. It was,

<v Speaker 1>he argued, with a straight face, mind you, simply impossible.

<v Speaker 1>And Margaret Knight answered him the way she answered every

<v Speaker 1>problem she ever faced, with the work. She came to

<v Speaker 1>that hearing fully loaded. She had her original drawings, her

<v Speaker 1>diary with dated entries tracking the invention from the very

<v Speaker 1>first moment she thought of it, her earlier models. Notes, samples, blueprints, witnesses,

<v Speaker 1>years of her own thinking laid out on the table

<v Speaker 1>for everyone to see. She could explain every gear and

<v Speaker 1>every fold because she had lived inside that machine for

<v Speaker 1>years while Charles Annan had just glanced at it. And ultimately,

<v Speaker 1>she won the case. And in 1871, the patent was

<v Speaker 1>awarded to Margaret Knight where it belonged. And her flat-bottomed

<v Speaker 1>paper bag machine went out into the world and never

<v Speaker 1>left it. The company she helped found manufactured those bags

<v Speaker 1>by the millions. The design was so good, it just

<v Speaker 1>simply became the way it's done. It was so good

<v Speaker 1>that everyone just stopped noticing that it was ever a

<v Speaker 1>design at all. Margaret went right on inventing well into

<v Speaker 1>her 70s, tinkering with rotary engines and heavy machinery. Just

<v Speaker 1>a small woman in a workshop full of iron doing

<v Speaker 1>the thing many, if not most men, thought a woman

<v Speaker 1>just couldn't do. Now, sadly, Margaret never got rich. When

<v Speaker 1>she died in 1914, her estate was worth only a

<v Speaker 1>few hundred dollars. She had spent her life making things,

<v Speaker 1>not money. And the fortunes that her inventions generated, she

<v Speaker 1>mostly put into other inventions. One obituary noted almost in

<v Speaker 1>passing that Margaret Knight, was the female Thomas Edison. Now,

<v Speaker 1>they're a little harder to find these days, but if

<v Speaker 1>you go in the right store, you'll still see them.

<v Speaker 1>And if you pick one up, you can snap it

<v Speaker 1>open and set that flat bottom paper bag right on

<v Speaker 1>the counter or a table or the back of your SUV.

<v Speaker 1>That everyday little object was dragged into existence by a

<v Speaker 1>little girl who wanted a jackknife instead of a doll

<v Speaker 1>and then defended herself in open court against a man

<v Speaker 1>whose entire case was was that women aren't smart enough

<v Speaker 1>to come up with an idea like that. But she was,

<v Speaker 1>and she proved it. And she left the proof in

<v Speaker 1>millions of hands carrying their groceries in from the car.

<v Speaker 1>That's Margaret Knight. That's Anonymous America. Anonymous America