Can you imagine a time when the only way to correct a mistake when “typing” was to redo the entire page? The horror! But with the advent of electric typewriters, that was precisely what happened. BETTE NESMITH GRAHAM changed that.
In 1951, Nesmith Graham, a single mother, worked as an executive secretary at a Texas bank. A decent paying job fraught with the time-wasting retypes on documents. Rather than kvetch about the situation, she developed a solution. Mixing tempera paint with water, and few other chemicals, she invented Liquid Paper in a kitchen blender. (The original name was Mistake Out.) She then brought the solution to work in a little bottle with a thin paintbrush, brushing away the typos, and her boss never knew! But the other secretaries noticed, and soon she was selling her homemade concoction to them. Word spread and by 1957 she was selling more than a hundred per month. A year later, she was fired by the bank because her project was taking too much of her time. No worries…
Nesmith Graham changed the name from Mistake Out to Liquid Paper, and got a patent and trademark. Within ten years, she’d established headquarters and an automated plant in Dallas. As the owner, she insisted there be a childcare facility and a library, as well as ensuring all employees had a say in company decisions. She used part of her money to establish two charitable foundations aimed at helping women in need. (Side note: her son, Michael Nesmith of Monkees fame, continued to donate to her charities until his death in 2021.) She sold her company to Gillette Corporation in 1979 for $47.5 million. Not bad for a product created in a blender.
Thanks to Bette Nesmith Graham, we still have products to correct our mistakes…on paper at least.
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