Bette Nesmith Graham
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Bette Nesmith Graham (23 March 1924 - 12 May 1980) was a typist, commercial artist, the inventor of Liquid Paper, and mother of musician and producer Michael Nesmith of The Monkees.
Graham was born in Dallas, Texas. She married Warren Nesmith before he left for war, but they divorced in 1946. To support herself as a single mother, she worked as a secretary at a bank, eventually rising to the executive secretary (the highest position open to women in the industry).
It was very difficult to erase mistakes made by early electric typewriters, which caused problems for Graham. In order to make extra money, she used her talent for painting to do holiday windows at the bank. She realized, as she said, "with lettering, an artist never corrects by erasing, but always paints over the error. So I decided to use what artists use. I put some tempera water-base paint in a bottle and took my watercolor brush to the office. And I used that to correct my mistakes."
Graham secretly used her white correction paint for five years. Some bosses admonished her against using it, but her coworkers frequently sought her paint out. She eventually began marketing her typewriter correction fluid as "Mistake Out" in 1956.
In 1979 she sold "Liquid Paper" to the Gillette Corporation for USD$47.5 million. At the time, her company employed 200 people and made 25 million bottles of Liquid Paper per year.
Bette Nesmith's son, former Monkees member Michael Nesmith, inherited the $50+ million estate of Liquid Paper upon her death on 12 May 1980. Bette Nesmith was 56 years of age.
[edit] References
- Ethlie Ann Vare and Greg Ptacek (2002). Patently Female: From AZT to TV Dinners, Stories of Women Inventors and Their Breakthrough Ideas. John Wiley & Sons. ISBN 0-471-02334-5.
