Who Was The Inventor of White Out? Key Facts, Dates And Stories

Who Was The Inventor of White Out? Key Facts, Dates And Stories

Bette Nesmith Graham, a single mother and secretary, invented white out in 1956. Her invention revolutionized the way people typed and corrected mistakes.
Graham was working as a secretary for the Texas Bank and Trust Company when she came up with the idea for whiteout. She was constantly making mistakes while typing, and she hated having to erase them and start over.

One day, she noticed the window painters at her bank using white paint to cover up their mistakes. She had an idea: why not use a similar technique to correct typing mistakes?

Graham experimented with different formulas and eventually developed a white correction fluid that was easy to apply and dried quickly. She started using it herself, and she soon realized that it could be a valuable tool for other secretaries. She began selling her correction fluid to her coworkers, and word of mouth quickly spread.

In 1958, Graham started her own company to sell her correction fluid, which she named Liquid Paper. Liquid Paper quickly became a popular product, and it is still used today by people all over the world.

Key Date

• 1924 – Born in San Antonio, Texas
• 1951 – Started working as an executive secretary at Texas Bank & Trust
• 1956 – First sold her homemade “Mistake Out” correction fluid
• 1958 – Patented her invention, then called “Liquid Paper”
• 1959 – Opened first Liquid Paper production facility beyond her home
• 1962 – Incorporated her business as the Liquid Paper Corporation
• 1967 – Opened an automated Liquid Paper factory and headquarters in Dallas
• 1975 – Moved company into a 35,000 sq ft international headquarters
• 1979 – Sold Liquid Paper Company to Gillette for $47.5 million
• 1980 – Passed away from cancer at age 56 in Dallas, Texas
• 1992 – Inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame posthumously

Key Facts & Stories

1. Bette Graham was a high school dropout

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Bette Nesmith Graham had to drop out of San Antonio’s Thomas Jefferson High School in 1940 during her senior year, cutting her formal education short. She made this difficult decision in order to work full-time as an executive secretary in support of her young son Michael Nesmith (who later became a member of The Monkees pop band).

As a single parent, Graham needed the steady income the secretarial job provided to her family. Though she didn’t complete high school, the typing and clerical skills Graham honed in the workplace directly contributed to identifying the need for and conceptualizing her eventual invention of liquid paper.

Dropping out was not easy, but her real-world office experience gave Graham insight into creating an innovative product that would help secretaries like herself.

2. She had a difficult time at work learning how to use the new typewriters

In 1951, Bette Nesmith Graham climbed the ladder of success to reach the prestigious position of executive secretary for W.W. Overton, the Chairman of the Board of the Texas Bank and Trust. While working there, Graham and her colleagues had to deal with the new IBM electric typewriters that were causing them trouble.

The machines were not user-friendly, and one small error would force them to retype entire pages, which was time-consuming and frustrating. It was during this period that Graham decided to come up with a more efficient alternative. She determinedly set out to find a solution to this problem and little did she know that her perseverance would lead her to become one of the most famous women inventors of the 20th century.

3. Bette’s frequent mistakes led to her great invention

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Though she had impressive typing skills and could produce documents at high speeds, Graham still made frequent typos, spelling errors, and mistakes when transcribing handwritten notes. In the 1950s, these minor errors resulted in secretaries having to fully retype entire pages from scratch.

Frustrated by the inefficiency, Graham began thinking about a quick-drying opaque liquid that could paint over and conceal typing mistakes without messy erasures or retyping.

After experimenting with tempera water-based paints and other solutions in her home, Graham refined a white opaque water-based paint formula that fit her criteria. This was the earliest form of liquid paper – originally called “Mistake Out” by Graham before being marketed as “Liquid Paper.” Graham’s own proficiency as a typist helped her identify the need for a fast-drying paint-like product that could quickly cover mistakes.

Her rapid typing speed contributed to frequent errors that spawned the invention, making her own imperfections essential to the ideation process. Thus Graham’s exceptional abilities and shortcomings intersected to produce a game-changing office product.

4. Bette used several formulas before getting the right product

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Bette’s journey to creating White Out was a gradual one. Her first attempt to solve the problem involved mixing tempera paint with a common household blender. She painted over her typing mistakes with her homemade concoction and waited for it to dry. Surprisingly, it worked! She could type over her errors without leaving a visible trace. Bette did not stop at one experiment, though. She continued to refine her formula until she achieved a white, opaque liquid that could effectively cover up mistakes.

The solution was simple but revolutionary. She dubbed her invention “Mistake Out.” She started using it herself, and she soon realized that it could be a valuable tool for other secretaries. She began selling her correction fluid to her coworkers, and word of mouth quickly spread.

5. She branded it as ‘Mistake Out’ and sold it to her fellow secretaries

When the secretaries at Texas Bank & Trust caught wind of Bette Nesmith Graham’s homemade “Mistake Out” invention in the mid-1950s, word spread fast about the magical opaque liquid that could swiftly correct typing errors. The other secretaries on staff were soon flooding Graham with requests to supply them with bottles of her product for their own use.

Seeing the demand from her colleagues, Graham decided to start selling her liquid paper formula commercially in 1956 for $1.29 per bottle under the unofficial brand name “Mistake Out.”

Graham began producing Mistake Out full-time from her home in Dallas to fulfil orders, recruiting her son Michael Nesmith and his artistic friends to help label and package the bottles. Only in her early 30s, Graham tackled filling sizable orders for Mistake Out largely by herself in makeshift facilities, often working late into the night while also caring for her family.

Her persistence and work ethic fueled the one-woman production line despite limited resources and space. Within just a few years, Graham’s homegrown liquid paper was being widely used in offices across Texas – thanks in large part to enthusiastic word-of-mouth marketing by secretaries who knew firsthand how useful Graham’s patented product was in easing their daily work. The secretaries’ support proved instrumental to Mistake Out’s eventual commercial success.

6. Bette further improved the whiteout formula and renamed it

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After initially marketing her opaque paint-like concoction as “Mistake Out” in 1956, Bette Nesmith Graham soon coined the more professional-sounding name “Liquid Paper” for her product. She began packaging and selling small white bottles of Liquid Paper from her Dallas home under this new brand name later in 1956.

Graham chose the name Liquid Paper to better communicate the white correction fluid’s usage for paper, along with emphasizing the paint-like liquid properties that distinguished it from a solid eraser.

7. She still worked as a secretary and kept the whiteout business as a side job

While still working as a secretary at the Bank, Bette was producing Liquid Paper completely independently in her kitchen, Graham personally handled every step of the early sales process – from blending the latex-based formula herself, bottling the product by hand, designing the label, fulfilling individual orders by mail, keeping financial records, and promoting it entirely through grassroots word-of-mouth marketing.

8. She finally patented her idea in 1958

After patenting Liquid Paper in 1958, demand steadily grew beyond Graham’s capacity to individually package and ship orders. This necessitated expanding into a dedicated production and shipping facility in 1959 and hiring additional staff to meet orders.

By 1960, just four years after starting to sell her homemade liquid paper mixture as “Mistake Out,” Bette Nesmith Graham was producing and shipping over 1,500 bottles per day from her home in Dallas to meet surging demand. Primarily secretaries raving about the product’s effectiveness to colleagues drove this exponential growth.

To manufacture such high volumes from her modest home kitchen and with no corporate infrastructure, Graham displayed immense creativity and work ethic. She optimized every inch of available counter space for assembly lines, recruited her son Michael and any other willing neighbourhood teens to help bottle and label orders after school, and worked deep into the night herself filling bottles by hand.

Keeping quality high while scaling production was a constant challenge requiring clever solutions with limited resources. Her hands-on approach was critical to building the Liquid Paper Company into a thriving business.

9. With her company growing fast, Bette moved it to a bigger space

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Over the decade following its humble homegrown origins, Bette Nesmith Graham’s Liquid Paper Company experienced explosive growth and evolution. Just a few years after Graham mixed up the very first bottles of white paint-like liquid paper herself in her kitchen, the fledgling company was churning out over a million bottles per year by 1967.

To accommodate rapidly increasing corporate demand, Graham opened a dedicated Liquid Paper headquarters and automated production plant in Dallas in 1967, a major upgrade from cottage industry production. The new 5,000-square-foot facility allowed more efficient mass manufacturing using custom machinery specifically designed to fill and seal Liquid Paper bottles at high speeds.

Merging her founder’s passion with a CEO’s acumen, Graham oversaw Liquid Paper’s expansion into international markets starting in the early 1970s. By 1975, Graham was running operations from an impressive 35,000-square-foot global headquarters for Liquid Paper Corporation. Her Dallas-based company now sells products worldwide, an indicator of the universal appeal of Liquid Paper as an essential office tool.

10. Bette Graham later sold her company for $27.5 Million

After 25 years of dedicated leadership in growing Liquid Paper into a multimillion-dollar enterprise, Bette Nesmith Graham sold her company to Gillette in 1979 for an astounding $47.5 million. As both founder and serving CEO, the sale marked the culmination of Graham’s journey taking her homemade office product to mass market success.

While likely a difficult decision to relinquish her life’s work, the lucrative acquisition deal also rewarded Graham’s tireless efforts and enabled new levels of expansion under Gillette’s size and resources. Liquid Paper’s sales had plateaued in the late 1970s under Graham’s management, making the company’s absorption into an industry giant strategically beneficial.

Bette Nesmith Graham, a secretary facing the daily frustration of typing errors, turned a simple kitchen experiment into a multi-million-dollar invention that reshaped the modern office. Her journey serves as an inspiring example of how even the simplest solutions can have a profound and lasting impact on the world.