“I put some tempera water-based paint in a bottle and took my watercolor brush to the office..."
Bette Graham
The correction fluid used worldwide to cover mistakes on paper began life in the United States in a single mother's North Dallas kitchen. In 1951, Bette Graham (1924-1980) was a young divorcee bringing up a small son, Michael (later Mike Nesmith of the Monkees pop group) and working as a secretary at Texas Bank & Trust. Bette and her colleagues appreciated the new speedy electric typewriters, but their carbon-film ribbons made fixing mistakes messy. The only answer was to type the whole sheet again.
Bette harbored artistic ambitions that had been thwarted by an early marriage. The story goes that her artist's eye spotted workers who were decorating the bank's windows and covering mistakes with an extra paint layer. Soon Bette was doing the same with a pale water-based tempera paint. Her boss never noticed and she began giving out bottles of her miracle "Mistake Out" fluid to colleagues.
Bette enlisted help, including a school chemistry teacher, to improve her formula. When, in 1958, she was fired for using her company headed paper for a bank letter, she was able to focus on promoting her product—now called Liguid Paper. She transferred operations to a factory in 1968, and by the 1970s was running a Dallas headquarters producing 25 million bottles a year. Bette sold out to Gillette in 1979 for $47.5 million, but was to die shortly afterward.
