In her time, she was called "the most famous woman inventor,” but today, chances are, you’ve never even heard of Margaret Eloise Knight. It’s unfortunate, because If you do any grocery shopping, you have her to thank for making it so much easier. Her invention created a product that is as unassuming as it is ubiquitous.

A self-taught engineer, Margaret Knight invented the machine to produce flat-bottomed paper bags, and then founded the Eastern Paper Bag Company in 1870, creating paper bags for groceries very similar to the ones used today.

During her lifetime, as a woman-inventor during the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, she overcame a surprising amount of adversity to achieve both her goals and the recognition she deserved—at a time when few women held intellectual property. Here is her story…

Early Years and Early Inventions

Margaret E. Knight was born in York, Maine on February 14, 1838 to Hannah Teal and James Knight. After her father died, “Mattie,” as her parents nickna...

American inventor, metallurgist, automotive pioneer, entrepreneur and industrialist, Elwood Haynes developed and built one of the first automobiles. For anyone, that would be more than enough for a lifetime achievement—but he was responsible for so many more invaluable contributions that endure to this day.

Haynes was born on October 14, 1857, in Portland, Indiana, the fifth of ten children of Jacob M. Haynes and Hilinda S. Haines Haynes. His family was of English descent.

Both of Haynes' parents were dedicated Presbyterians and outspoken prohibitionists and educated their children from a young age to avoid liquor. His mother was the founder of a local Women's Temperance Movement Union. His paternal grandfather Henry Haynes was a gunsmith and mechanic, and tutored Haynes about metallurgy. In 1866, the family moved from their two-room house in Portland into the countryside outside of town where they purchased a larger home to better accommodate their growing number of children.

A...

On This Day, April 9, 1940, the patent for the first shopping cart is granted to its inventor Sylvan Goldman, the owner of a Humpty Dumpty Grocery store in Oklahoma City. It was essentially a folding chair with wheels and baskets attached. The carts were initially a flop, as shoppers were reluctant to use them--men found them effeminate and women thought them too much like a baby carriage - so he hired models to shop with them.

Eventually, folding carts became very popular and Goldman became a multimillionaire by collecting a royalty on every folding design shopping cart in the United States.

By any measure, Goldman was an innovator. In addition to his invention of the shopping cart, early in his career as a grocer he developed many of the advertising and marketing techniques now commonly used by supermarkets.

He once said his idea for the shopping cart came from watching women carrying baskets. ''They had a tendency to stop shopping when the baskets became too full or too heavy,'...

This story came to mind today, because it was on this Day, February 26, 1829, that Levi Strauss was born in Buttenheim, Bavaria. Levi was the son of Hirsch Strauss and his second wife, Rebecca.

At age 18, Levi Strauss travelled with his mother and two sisters to the United States to join his brothers Jonas and Louis, who had begun a wholesale dry goods business in New York City called J. Strauss Brother & Co. Their business was thriving.

When the Gold Rush hit, they wanted to meet the needs of the miners and farmers also seeking their fortune, and devised a plan for Levi to travel to the West Coast and set up a version of their dry goods business there.

Strauss boarded a steamer bound for Panama, then walked across the isthmus and boarded another steamer sailing north to the shores of the California Gold Rush. He arrived on a rainy March day in 1853, and soon set up a dry goods wholesale business on San Francisco’s waterfront under his own name —Levi Strauss & Co.

Within two ...