Margaret Knight's paper bag innovations made her (likely) the first woman granted a U.S. patent.

Research at MoMA’s Counter Space blog has uncovered the 19th-century inventors who created various aspects of the brown paper bag, which we take for granted when we’re at the supermarket. If you think about it, the design, elegant and sturdy, is just about perfect. (Thanks Kottke.) An excerpt from the blog post:

“Francis Wolle, active in the early 1850s, is considered the first inventor of the modern paper bag. Based in Pennsylvania, he cofounded the Union Paper Bag Machine Company in 1869, as well as becoming ordained as a deacon and following passions in entomology and botany. Union was supported financially by wealthy manufacturers, who thereby secured rights to patents secured by the company and divvied up the country into market segments to avoid direct competition. One of these characters was industrialist George West of Saratoga County, New York, also known as the ‘Paper Bag King.’ Originally from England, he established himself in Ballston Spa, owned ten paper mills, and became a member of the New York State Assembly and the House of Representatives.

It was slightly later that a woman named Margaret Knight, working for another company, the Columbia Paper Bag Company of Springfield, MA, designed a machine that could produce flat/square-bottomed paper bags, a great improvement on the earlier, structurally weaker envelope-style bag design. As a result, it is Knight who is more widely recognized as the inventor of the paper bag in the general form of the one shown in Counter Space. She’s also believed to be the first woman to achieve a U.S. patent.

However, our paper bag also reflects the design developments of the following years (starting around 1883) made by Charles Stilwell of Massachusetts/Pennsylvania (originally Fremont, Ohio), who improved on Knight’s machine to produce flat-bottomed paper bags—now with pleated sides for easier folding and stacking (satchel-style)—more quickly and cost-effectively. This type was given the nickname ‘S.O.S.’ (self-opening-sack), and really provided the model for the mass-produced paper bags we know today.”