Returning to the idea of women who were inventors and/or entrepreneurs, allow me to introduce you to Bette Nesmith Graham, a struggling single mother who founded what became a multi-million dollar business in her kitchen[1].

In 1954, Bette Nesmith Graham was a divorced single mother who supported herself and her son, Michael,[2] by working as the executive secretary for the chairman of the Texas Bank and Trust in Dallas. But the introduction of new technology to American offices, in the form of IBM’s electric typewriter, threatened that position and her livelihood.

Nesmith Graham was an excellent secretary overall, but she was not a good typist. The transition to an electronic typewriter was a nightmare. The new typewriters allowed typists to work more quickly, but they had sensitive keys, which triggered more typos than the stiffer manual typewriter keys. Worse, they used carbon ribbons instead of fabric ones: when typists tried to fix a mistake with a pencil eraser, the carbon ink would smear all over the page, meaning that a secretary often had to retype an entire page because of a single mistake. As far as Nesmith Graham was concerned, it was lose/lose.

Even though the position of executive secretary was as high as a woman could go as a clerical worker, she lived paycheck-to-paycheck on her salary of $300 a month.[3] to make extra money, she would take on side jobs, which often used the artistic skills she had learned from her mother, who was an artist and small business owner. One of those jobs was helping dress display windows at the bank that Christmas. Watching the display artists paint windows with a festive scene, Nesmith Graham noticed that when they made a mistake they painted over it. It was an “aha!” moment. Why couldn’t she do the same thing when she made a typing error?

She started with a small watercolor brush and fast-drying water-based tempera paint that she tinted to match the bank’s stationary. She brought it to the office in nail polish bottles, which she hid in her desk so her boss wouldn’t see. But while her boss might not have noticed her careful corrections using the paint, other secretaries did and asked her to make bottles for them.

Soon she was staying up late at night working in her kitchen,  making batches of “Mistake Out” in her blender and filling bottles. Determined to make it a viable business, she researched paint formulas in the local library. She collaborated with her son’s chemistry teacher to improve the consistency of the product and paid an industrial polymer chemist $200 to help her develop a formula that would dry more quickly.

Orders increased. She formed the Mistake Out Company in 1956, though she couldn’t yet afford the $400 fee to patent the idea.

At night she filled the growing orders from other secretaries in Dallas and sent samples to potential buyers. She sent IBM two typed documents, one with errors corrected with an eraser and one with her correcting fluid, along with a personal note in which she said “I truly believe that this can mean a turning point from the old methods—a new era.” She hoped IBM would be interested in marketing the product. IBM declined.

On the weekends, she traveled from Dallas to San Antonio and Houston trying to market the product.

Eventually orders increased enough that she hired her first employees. She paid her teenage son and his friends a dollar an hour to fill nail polish bottles using restaurant-style ketchup bottles, cut the tips of the brushing inside the bottle caps at an angle, and paste on labels.

It was, perhaps, inevitable that working two jobs would catch up with her. One day she signed a letter at the bank as “The Mistake Out Company.” She was promptly fired.

Without the safety net of her secretarial job, Nesmith Graham concentrated on building her correction fluid business. In 1958, she renamed the product “Liquid Paper” and could finally afford to file for a patent. That same year, the business made a breakthrough when an article in a trade magazine for secretaries, called The Secretary, described Liquid Paper as “the answer to a secretary’s prayer.” Soon after that General Electric placed an order for 400 bottles in three colors—her first large order. Orders from other large companies followed, including IBM. (I bet Graham did a dance of triumph the day that order came in. Or maybe she blew a raspberry in the direction of Big Blue.)

With the help of her second husband, Robert Graham, a former frozen food salesman who used his experience to sell Liquid Paper to office supply stores across the country, the business grew. She moved the business from her kitchen to her garage, to a trailer and then to a four-room house. In 1956, Nesmith Graham was selling 500 bottles of Liquid Paper each week, produced in her kitchen. By 1968 what was then the Mistake Out Company was a million-dollar business, producing one million bottles of Liquid Paper annually.

In 1968, Nesmith Graham changed the name of the company to Liquid Paper Corporation, and filed for a trademark. In 1969, she built a new company headquarters that was well ahead of its time in terms of making it easy for employees to work there. It was wheel-chair accessible 21 years before the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. It included an in-plant library, an employee-owned credit union, and, perhaps because of her struggles as a single mother, an onsite childcare center.

The company continued to grow: at its height, it produced 25 million bottles of Liquid Paper a year. That’s a lot of typos. (More of them were mine than I like to admit.)

She faced a new business challenge in 1975, following the end of her marriage . After their divorce, Robert Graham, who was then chairman of the board, convinced company executives to bar Nesmith Graham from both the building and any business decisions. He attempted to change the Liquid Paper formula, which she had spent ten years perfecting and which was legally protected as a trade secret. If the formula was changed, it would lose its trade secret protection and Nesmith Graham would lose her royalty rights.

She fought back. (Are you surprised?) After regaining controlled of the company, she sold it to the Gillette Corporation for $475 million in 1980. She died six months later, at the age of 56.

On behalf of all of us whose typing wasn’t our strongest skill, I thank you, Bette Nesmith Graham.

[1] The single mother equivalent of tech bros inventing things in their parents’ garages. It’s a cliche for a reason.
[2] He became a musician, best known as a member of the pop band The Monkees. (I’ve suffered from an ear worm or two since learning this.) He later founded a multimedia production company, Pacific Arts, and helped pioneer music videos. But I digress.
[3] Roughly $3500 today. Slightly less than the average secretary makes in Dallas today.