"If anyone ever profited from her own mistakes it was Bette Clair Graham. A bank secretary and a freelance artist, Mrs. Graham concocted in her kitchen in 1954 a fluid to paint over her typing errors. Using her knowledge of pigments & solvents, she "put some tempera water base paint in a bottle & took my watercolor brush to the office & used that to correct my mistakes", according to a recent interview.
She kept the invention to herself, but two years later the liquid she called "Mistake-Out" was being used by all the secretaries in her building & an office supply dealer urged her to market it. But marketing agencies weren't impressed & she decided to sell the fluid on her own. She formed Liquid Paper Corp. & in a few months was filling orders from around the country for the tiny bottles of white paint equipped with a small brush.
Mrs. Graham died May 12, 1980 at age 56 of an undisclosed illness, having sold the firm in November of 1979 to the Gillette Co. for $47.5 million. At the time of her death those tiny white bottles were earning $3.5 million annually on sales of $38 million.".
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