Birth in York, Maine

Margaret Eloise Knight was born on February 14, 1838, in York, Maine, to a family that would soon relocate to the industrial mill town of Manchester, New Hampshire. Her father died when she was young, and the family's economic circumstances meant that Margaret, like many children of the era, began working in the cotton mills as a child rather than pursuing formal schooling.

It was in the Manchester mills that Knight first displayed the mechanical ingenuity that would define her life. Around age twelve, she witnessed a horrific accident when a steel-tipped shuttle flew out of a loom and injured a worker. In response, she devised a simple safety device — a shuttle restraint — that was later adopted by mills throughout the region, though she never patented it, receiving no financial benefit from the innovation.

This early, undocumented invention foreshadowed a remarkable career: Knight would go on to become one of the most prolific women inventors of the nineteenth century, eventually holding at least 27 U.S. patents across industries ranging from paper manufacturing to automotive engineering. Her birth in a modest New England family, without access to formal engineering education, makes her later achievements all the more historically significant, as she overcame both economic hardship and the era's steep barriers against women in technical fields.