By Emily Arnold McCully
The true story of a girl who carried a notebook everywhere, and grew up to beat a man in court who swore no woman could have built her machine.
Mattie Knight was born in 1838 and drew constantly, filling a pocket notebook with sketches of things that didn't exist yet. She made kites and sleds for her brothers. By twelve she was working in a cotton mill in New Hampshire, and when she watched a steel-tipped shuttle fly loose off a loom and injure a worker, she went away and designed a device to stop a loom the instant it happened. Years later she built something bigger: a machine that folded and glued flat-bottomed paper bags, the kind you still carry groceries home in. A man named Charles Annan saw her iron model sitting in the machine shop, copied it, and ran to the patent office ahead of her. In court he argued that a woman's mind simply could not have understood the machinery. Mattie brought her notebooks, dated, in her own hand, full of the drawings that got her there. She won the patent in 1871 and kept inventing for the rest of her life.
The genius of this one is the notebook. McCully puts Mattie's sketches in panels along the bottom of the pages, so a child watches ideas get worked out on paper before they ever get built, and the quiet message is that this is a thing you can do too, today, with a pencil. It's also the rare invention story with a real antagonist and a real courtroom, which gives it a spine most picture-book biographies don't have. And the invention is a paper bag. There's nothing glamorous about it, which is exactly why it works, because it teaches a child that the made world is full of things somebody had to think of first.