knight, margaret e.

"A fictionalized account of Margaret E. Knight's struggle to win legal rights to the invention of the paper-bag machine. Fifteen-year-old Mattie holds a rare position at Columbia Paper: Unlike the other girls and women, she doesn't run machines or hand-fold paper bags. She's a mechanic. In her first job at a cotton mill, she invented a device to keep women from being injured by flying shuttles. When Mattie learns that newly hired Civil War veterans, including Frank, a mechanic she trained, are earning higher salaries simply because they are men, she makes a bet with the factory owner: If she can beat Frank in inventing a paper-bag-folding machine, the women's wages will be raised to equal the men's. She does so, then faces a daunting road to receiving a patent--before learning that someone has stolen her idea. Mattie takes the thief to court and wins, just as she did in real life"--Kirkus Reviews.

Presents a biography of Margaret Knight, detailing the events that led up to her invention of a machine capable of creating flat-bottom paper bags.

Text and illustrations offer an introduction to the life and inventions of nineteenth-century Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor of wireless communication.

Describes inventor Margaret E. Knight's childhood, explaining how her interest in mechanical innovations began, and tells the story of her invention of a paper bag maker and her legal battle for the patent after someone stole her idea.

A short illustrated biography about the woman who invented the paper bag.