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Bette Nesmith Graham (March 23, 1924 – May 12, 1980) was an American typist, commercial artist, and the inventor of the correction fluid Liquid Paper. Born as Bette Clair McMurry,[1] she married Warren Nesmith at the age of 19 and became the mother of the musician and producer Michael Nesmith, who later became the guitarist of The Monkees.[2] After Warren returned from serving in World War II, the couple divorced, leaving Bette to raise Michael as a single mother. She married Robert Graham in 1962, and he helped her run the lucrative Liquid Paper business that she had founded a few years prior.
Born in 1924 in Dallas, Texas, Bette Graham dropped out of Alamo Heights High School in San Antonio at the age of seventeen and went to secretarial school.[3] By 1951, she had worked her way up to the position of executive secretary for W. W. Overton, the Chairman of the Board of the Texas Bank and Trust. Around this time, electric typewriters were becoming increasingly popular, and Graham and her colleagues at the bank began experiencing trouble with the new IBM electric typewriters. The messy carbon-film ribbons used in typewriters and the primarily mechanical set-ups of the devices made it especially difficult to erase and fix mistakes neatly. Users typically had to retype entire pages because of one small error, which made correcting errors a painstaking and time-consuming process. As a result, Graham was determined to find a more efficient alternative, leading her to develop the first prototype of "Liquid Paper" in 1956.
The original inspiration for Graham's breakthrough innovation came as she observed painters decorating the bank windows for the holidays. Rather than remove their mistakes entirely, the painters simply covered any imperfections with an additional layer. Applying the artists' technique of painting over mistakes, Graham began experimenting with mixing white, water-based tempera paint to match the color of the bank stationery and cover up her typing errors. After developing her initial mixture, Graham first used it in the office and saw remarkable results; by using a watercolor brush to apply the correction fluid, her boss never even noticed any concealed mistakes. Her invention began as a kitchen and garage operation, where she used her kitchen blender to mix the correction fluid and then poured it into empty nail polish bottles. She named the first batch of her new invention "Mistake Out", and she hired her son and his friends to work on assembling the product for $1 per hour in her garage.
When the other secretaries realized how well Graham's invention worked, they asked her for their own supplies of the correction fluid. The inventor sold her first batch of "Mistake Out" in 1956, and soon she was working full-time to produce and bottle it from her North Dallas home. Her son Michael – who would later achieve fame as a member of the pop group The Monkees – and his friends helped to fill the growing number of orders for Mistake Out. Graham continued to make improvements to her product, testing different angles of cut on the nail polish brush for easier application. Additionally, she experimented with alternative formulas that allowed for quicker drying times. Before long, she was selling about 100 bottles of Mistake Out every month.
In 1958, Graham renamed her refined product "Liquid Paper" and applied for a patent and a trademark that same year. Although she was fired from her bank job for spending excessive time on her invention, she received a patent for her product and gained General Electric as one of her big corporate clients. Graham's Liquid Paper Company experienced tremendous growth over the next decade. By 1967, the company had its own corporate headquarters and automated production plant, and sales were in excess of one million units per year. In 1975, Graham moved operations into a 35,000-sq. ft. international Liquid Paper headquarters building in Dallas. At the height of her success, her company was making 25 million bottles of Liquid Paper per year.
In 1979, she opted to sell the company to Gillette Corporation for over $47.5 million. Graham then established two foundations, the Gihon Foundation, which gave grants and financial support to promote women in the arts, and the Bette Clair McMurray Foundation, which did the same for women in business. She died on May 12, 1980, due to complications of a stroke. She left her fortune to her son, who took over her foundations.
From the start, Graham ran her company with a unique combination of spirituality, egalitarianism, and pragmatism. Raised a Baptist, Graham converted to Christian Science in 1942, and this faith inspired the development of her corporate "Statement of Policy". Part code of ethics, part business philosophy, it covered everything from her belief in a "Supreme Being" to a focus on decentralized decision making and an emphasis on product quality over the pursuit of profit. She also believed that women could bring a more nurturing and humanistic quality to the male world of business, and provided a greenbelt with a fish pond, an employee library, and a childcare center in her new company headquarters in 1975.[4]
Her only son, musician Michael Nesmith, inherited half of his mother's estate of over $50 million.[5] A portion financed the Gihon Foundation which established the Council on Ideas, a think tank with a retreat center located north of Santa Fe, New Mexico, active from 1990 to 2000 and devoted to exploring world problems.[6] Additionally, a portion of Graham's estate financed the Betty Clair McMurray Foundation, which focuses on supporting projects such as the exhibit "Texas Women, A Celebration of History," career guidance for unwed mothers, shelter and counseling for battered women, and college scholarships for mature women.[7] As part of its effort to acknowledge prominent people who had been previously overlooked, in 2018 The New York Times published a belated obituary for her.[8]
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