Knight's machine lived up to expectations, and soon cheap flat-bottomed paper bags were widely available. Instead, she was simply paid cash and company stock for the use of her patent. Knight had no interest in running a business, however under the agreement, she took no management role at Eastern. Knight fielded a number of business offers, eventually enter-ing into a partnership with a businessman from Newton, Massachusetts, with whom she founded the Eastern Paper Bag Company of Hartford, Connecticut. She took Annan to court in 1870 and won her case (see box, The Patent Battle).Īnnan was not the only person to recognize the value of Knight's invention. Knight discovered that Annan had spent a lot of time in a machinist's shop where she was having a model of her device made, and she decided that he must have copied her design. She applied for a patent, only to discover that a man named Charles Annan had taken out a patent already for a machine Knight found suspiciously similar to her own. After a couple of years, Knight had a working machine that made flat-bottomed paper bags.
Once Knight told him what she was trying to do, he decided to support her efforts. She spent so much time at work studying the problem that her employer complained about her wasting time.
Knight spent a good deal of time at work watching how flat-bottomed bags were made and trying to figure out how to duplicate the process with a machine, which would have to roll and glue the paper into a tube, then cut, fold, and paste the bottom into a square. Knight found her job boring, and she soon became interested in the problem of designing a machine that could make a flat-bottomed paper bag. The Columbia factory used machines to make the narrow kind of paper bag but the workers made the flat-bottomed kind by hand.
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