Before the age of computers, important documents had to be produced using a typewriter. While this was a great way of producing printed documents, if you made one mistake at the end of the document, you had to retype the entire page. With a little creativity and perseverance, an executive secretary by the name of Bette Nesmith Graham came up with a solution that would allow typists to cover their mistakes and salvage their documents.
Graham was born in 1924 in Dallas, Texas. After divorcing her first husband, she went to work as a secretary at a bank to support herself and her son. While working as a secretary, she became frustrated with the electric typewriters that were replacing the older models at the time. The electric models did not allow the user to erase mistakes, so every time she made a mistake in a document, she'd have to retype it. Inspiration struck while she was watching painters decorate the bank windows. When they made a mistake, they just added another layer of paint over the original, thereby masking the mistake. Graham put some white tempura paint in a bottle and used a paintbrush to paint it over her errors.
Over the next five years, she worked with her son's chemistry teacher to tweak her formula. Graham named her new product Mistake Out and started marketing it in 1956. Upon launching her own company, she changed the product's name to Liquid Paper. Graham ran the company until it was sold to the Gillette Corporation in 1979 for $47.5 million.
No comments:
Post a Comment