Liquid Paper / Correction Fluid
Bette Nesmith Graham was not
a very good typist. Still, the high school dropout worked her way through the
secretarial pool to become the executive secretary for the chairman of the
board of the Texas Bank and Trust. It was the 1950s, and the electric
typewriter had just been introduced. Secretaries often found themselves
retyping entire pages because of one tiny mistake, as the new model's carbon
ribbon made it difficult to correct errors.
One day, Graham watched workers painting a holiday display on a bank window. She noticed that when they made mistakes, they simply added another layer of paint to cover them up, and she thought she could apply that idea to her typing blunders. Using her blender, Graham mixed up a water-based tempera paint with dye that matched her company's stationary. She took it to work and, using a fine watercolor brush, she was able to quickly correct her errors. Soon, the other secretaries were clamoring for the product, which Graham continued to produce in her kitchen. Graham was fired from her job for spending so much time distributing what she called "Mistake Out," but in her unemployment she was able to tweak her mixture, rename the product Liquid Paper and receive a patent in 1958. Even though typewriters have been replaced by computers in many offices, many people still have a bottle or two of that white correction fluid on hand.
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