EVERYDAY TECHNOLOGIES AND INVISIBLE INVENTORS
Margaret Knight: How a Working-Class Woman Who Invented Our Common Grocery Bag in 1871 Proved Adam Smith Right?
Margaret E. Knight: The female hero who invented mass market flat-bottomed paper grocery bags
OUR everyday lives are full of mundane technologies that are so ubiquitous that we do not even recognize them as innovations anymore. The case of paper grocery bags is one such. The square-bottomed paper bag we use to carry groceries from the store, packets from the gift shop, or pack sandwiches is the result of the astute inventiveness of a young woman from the late-nineteenth century. To this day, they are manufactured using updated versions of an invention of this working-class woman who barely had any formal education!
Adam Smith and America’s most famous nineteenth-century female inventor
Margaret E. Knight (1838–1914) might not have had read the story of the pin factory that Adam Smith wrote in his book, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. However, Knight, who was born six decades after the publication of the book, exemplified what the Scottish economist-philosopher narrated…
