Bette Nesmith Graham

Bette Nesmith Graham was born in Dallas, Texas, in 1924, and left school before her final year, later marrying young and having a son before the marriage ended, leaving her to support herself and her child as a secretary in the years after the Second World War. Typewriters then offered no easy way to fix a mistake without retyping a whole page, a source of constant, low-level stress in an office job where accuracy mattered and her livelihood depended on it.

Drawing on what she had learned about paint while lettering bank windows in a side job, she began mixing a quick-drying, water-based white paint in her kitchen blender to dab over typing errors so they could be typed over cleanly once dry. She shared small bottles with other secretaries at work, and demand grew steadily by word of mouth, so she began bottling and selling it herself under the name Mistake Out, later renamed Liquid Paper, filling orders from home in the evenings after her office job.

She was fired from her secretarial job in 1958 after her employer noticed her focus had shifted to her own product, a setback that in fact freed her to build the correction fluid business full time. She patented and refined the formula, built a small factory, and by the 1970s Liquid Paper was selling millions of bottles a year worldwide.

She sold the company to Gillette in 1979 for a sum in the tens of millions, and used part of her fortune to fund foundations supporting women in business, dying the following year having built an enduring product from a simple kitchen fix to her own daily frustration.