Bette Nesmith Graham and the Invention of Correctional Fluid

Although Michael Nesmith is best known as a member of The Monkees, he would have had some minor fame if he had never learned to sing or play an instrument. His mother, Bette Nesmith Graham, was the inventor of the substance known as correctional fluid or liquid paper. While he was a successful musician himself, the bulk of his wealth can be attributed to his mother and the successful marketing of her one invention. As her only heir, he received half of her $50,000,000 estate when she died in 1980.

Bette Nesmith Graham married Michael's father, Audrey Nesmith, during World War II, but divorced him in 1946. Although she had dreamed of being an artist, she obtained work as a secretary in a Dallas, Texas bank to support herself and her young child. By all accounts, she was a skilled a professional secretary and quickly became the executive secretary at the bank. Hoping to find a way to work more efficiently, she invented white out as a way of quickly covering typing errors that might otherwise take a great deal of time to fix.

From her limited experience with art, she knew that artists rarely erase mistakes they make while painting. Instead, they hide the mistakes by painting over them. Bette realized that there was no reason that she could not use the same process to correct typing mistakes. To that end, she went home used her blender to mix some tempra waterbased paints into a color that matched the stationary she used. She mixed the colors so well that her boss could not tell when she had used it. In a time when a single mistake might require retyping an entire page, this correctional fluid greatly reduced the time required to correct errors.