Bette Nesmith Graham circa 1956

Thank you to John Hineman for this suggestion. He writes: “I think apart from sliced bread, liquid paper is the best invention of the 20th century!” He’s a teacher, and would appreciate tidy papers. Bette Nesmith Graham was a divorced single mother who lived in Dallas Texas. She was a freelance artist, but found it tough to support herself and her son. So in 1951, at the age of 17, she learned shorthand and typing, and got a job as a secretary. Back then, typewriters used a carbon film ribbon. Graham found it made a huge mess when she tried to erase her mistakes. She found a better way. She decided that she would do what painters did to cover up their mistakes – paint over them. She took her water-based paint to work, along with a brush. She always made sure the paint matched the colour of paper she was typing on. Her boss never noticed the mistakes. When another secretary asked for some of her special correcting fluid, Graham found a bottle at home, wrote "Mistake Out" on a label, and gave it to her. Soon all the other secretaries in the building wanted some, too. By 1956, Graham’s invention became so popular that she turned her kitchen into a laboratory and mixed up batches of “Mistake Out” using her electric mixer. When demand grew, Graham changed the name of “Mistake Out” to “Liquid Paper” and applied for a patent and trademark. By 1975, the company Liquid Paper employed 200 people, and had made 25 million bottles of the correctional fluid, which was distributed to 31 countries. Graham sold the company four years later to Gillette for $47.5 million. In the late seventies, Bette Graham established the Bette Clair McMurray Foundation to help women. She described herself as a “feminist who wants freedom for myself and everybody else.” She died on May 12, 1980, and left a huge fortune to be divided between her son and the foundation. (Sources: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Texas at Austin and the Texas State Historical Association)