BYOB

I was at Target over the weekend and the woman in line in front of me had two of those Target re-usable sacks that everyone is using now instead of having to choose between paper and plastic. At first, it made me ashamed that I still haven’t gotten fully onboard with this Save the Earth thing that seems to be going around these days, but then it made me wonder when we switched from carting our hand woven baskets to the market to the store supplied paper sacks that continue to live on at Super Stop Shops. Things that make you go “hmm.”

You gotta love the internet, don’t you? For every stupid curiosity you have in the world, someone is out there with the answer. In this case, about.com. The first historical notation of paper bag usage comes from England in 1630. Good golly! But the custom didn’t really get moving until the Industrial Revolution when an American, Francis Wolle, patented a paper bag folding machine in 1852, and then – my favorite – Margaret Knight, an employee at a paper bag factory, figured out how to make the flat-bottomed grocery bags that was a precursor to the bag we know and love today. (Before that, they were folded like an envelope. Weird.) Anway, Ole Meg almost didn’t get the credit. This is comes from ideafinder.com:

About two years after the Civil War she went to work for the Columbia Paper Bag Company in Springfield, Massachusetts. While in the factory, she invented a device to cut, fold and paste bag bottoms. Initially her employer complained about the time she spent on the device. When she suggested she might consider selling the rights to him if it worked, he gave in. After doing thousands of trial bags on a wooden machine, she had an iron model produced in Boston.

However, before she could place the patent application, she found a man named Charles Annan who had studied her machine while visiting the factory was attempting to a patent machine suspiciously similar to her own. Knight, 33 at the time, filed a patent interference suit against Annan. She played to win, spending $100 a day plus expenses for 16 days of depositions of herself and other key Boston witnesses. Annan claimed that because Knight was a woman she could not possibly understand the mechanical complexities of the machine. Due to her careful notes, diary entries, samples and expertise the court ruled in her favor.

That Annan guy went on to patent his tweaked version anyway.

And as for the plastic bag? That came along in 1977. Odd to think that they came along during my lifetime, and might be fazed out during it too if this Bring Your Own Bag fad continues.