Francis Wolle (December 17, 1817 in Jacobsburg,

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...

– 1893 in

Bethlehem, Pennsylvania Bethlehem is a city in Northampton and Lehigh Counties in the Lehigh Valley region of eastern Pennsylvania, United States. As of the 2020 census, Bethlehem had a total population of 75,781. Of this, 55,639 were in Northampton County and 19, ...

) was an American

priest A priest is a religious leader authorized to perform the sacred rituals of a religion, especially as a mediatory agent between humans and one or more deities. They also have the authority or power to administer religious rites; in particu ...

of the

Moravian Church The Moravian Church ( cs, Moravská církev), or the Moravian Brethren, formally the (Latin: "Unity of the Brethren"), is one of the oldest Protestantism, Protestant Christian denomination, denominations in Christianity, dating back to the Bohem ...

, inventor and phycologist. Francis Wolle invented the first bag-making machine in 1851, forming the basis for the Union Bag and Paper Company. Wolle patented his "Machine for Making Bags of Paper" in 1852. In his words, "pieces of paper of suitable length are given out from a roll of the required width, cut off from the roll and otherwise suitably cut to the required shape, folded, their edges pasted and lapped, and formed into complete and perfect bags." The machine produced 1,800 bags per hour. He patented a more elaborate machine in 1855, and a third in 1858 with a provision "for preventing the loss of the strips of paper usually cut off in order to make the bottom lap or seam of the bag." This last feature prevented those strips from jamming the machine. Wolle's bags were folded similarly to

aerogram An aerogram, aerogramme, aérogramme, air letter or airletter is a thin lightweight piece of foldable and gummed paper for writing a letter for transit via airmail, in which the letter and envelope are one and the same. Most postal administration ...

s; several tablike edges were folded over and pasted. These early bags had an envelope-shaped bottom, and could not stand upright on their own. They had to be held open while being filled, and could not easily hold bulky items such as groceries and hardware goods. Margaret E. Knight patented a machine in 1871 for the manufacture of flat-bottomed paper bags. In 1892 the company relocated from

to Hudson Falls, New York, where it had a paper mill. The Union Camp Corporation was formed by the 1956 merger of the Union Bag and Paper Company with Camp Manufacturing. Currently his company is under the ownership of International Paper.

Works

* ''Desmids of the United States and list of American Pediastrums'', 1884 * ''Fresh-Water Algae of the United States (exclusive of the Diaomaceae) : complemental to Desmids of the United States'', 1887 * ''Diatomacea of North America'', 1890

References

1817 births 1893 deaths 19th-century American inventors American phycologists {{US-inventor-stub

Works

See also

References