Bette Nesmith Graham, Who Invented Liquid Paper

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/obituaries/bette-nesmith-graham-liquid-paper.html

by numbsafari • 8 years ago

73 16 8 years ago

princekolt• 8 years ago

This is such a great example of why arts and sciences ought to interact more.

Does anyone know what solvent they were using? At one point, probably in early 1976, I took a sample of Liquid Paper thinner to my high school chemistry teacher, just out of curiosity, to see if he could figure out what it was. He revealed to me his pride and joy, an infrared spectrophotometer he kept in a room behind the lab. We ran a sample, but the resulting absorption curve wasn't anything he recognized, and we didn't pursue it any further. I'm sure it wasn't water, and I think he would have recognized carbon tetrachloride or something obvious like that, but that's about all the clues I have.

I never knew the story behind Liquid Paper, though, until now.

rgbrenner• 8 years ago

the original was just water based tempera paint. I'm not sure when, but definitely by the 70s, they reformulated it with trichloroethane as the solvent. In the 80s, that was replaced with naphtha.

ScottBurson2• 8 years ago

Ah, thanks. Yes, trichloroethane makes sense.

danso2• 8 years ago

Graham died in 1980, but this obit was published yesterday because it's part of the NYT's project to write obits for "remarkable people" in the past (e.g. Ada Lovelace and Henrietta Lacks) who apparently died without note.

Not interested in getting into a gender bias/history debate (I think most of us can agree that there was inequality decades ago), but I was genuinely surprised that the NYT in 1980 wouldn't have written an obit for Graham at the time of her death. Her life has all the facets of a great interesting story, and she was wealthy in her own lifetime. And the newsroom then ran on typewriters, so it's not like Liquid Paper would've be an obscure topic.

Her story of invention is fascinating enough on its own -- a divorced single mother hacking something to make her job easier, reading books on her own to learn the chemistry, implementing it in her kitchen at night, then getting fired when her boss finds out she has a side-gig. But even more remarkable, she actually succeeded. Unlike a lot of inventors, she got to reap the benefits of her hard work and brilliance, including owning her own company (even fighting off her ex-husband's attempt to steal it) and becoming wealthy. That her death wouldn't be noticeable for an obit (again, at a newspaper that has thousands of typewriters) is really surprising even if you think 1980 had the same social standards as 1930.

FWIW, Wikipedia has had an entry for her since 2004: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bette_Nesmith_Graham

agumonkey• 8 years ago

it's exhausting just reading, I'd really like to know what she was thinking in her mind..

legostormtroopr• 8 years ago

Overlooked? The fact that Bette Nesmith Graham invented Liquid Paper has been a staple of trivia for ever. In part because of her famous son.

The story starts from a biased almost sexism-baiting opening line "obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men". Perhaps the New York Times didn't write an obituary, but the rest of the world knew who she was. This is aside from the fact that there are certainly white men who they probably overlooked as well.

Angostura• 8 years ago

Other than she was her famous son's mother and the bare fact that she invented the stuff, did you know anything about her remarkable story? I didn't.

The NYT's mission here is to correct what it sees as its own previous omissions. Whether many other outlets wrote obituaries at the time is hardly the issue.

danso2• 8 years ago

Obituaries are more detailed than summing someone's life up as a trivia question.

skookumchuck• 8 years ago

It's a great American success story.

It's also one of those inventions that seems so obvious in hindsight.

wolfhumble• 8 years ago

Fond memories of the black and white 'Liquid Paper' and the green, black and white 'Pen & ink' in the late 70's early 80's [1]. The former specialised for type writer and the latter, well, Pen and ink :-)

My mom and dad had the agency for the product in our country for a few years, building up the recognition of the brand, sales and distribution. Remember I had stickers of 'Pen & ink' on books, walls and generally all over the place . . . good memories.

In 1979 the Liquid Paper Company was sold to the Gillette Corporation, and we were told that they would manage the marketing and sales themselves. Not too surprising, Gillette had marketing and distribution of their products plenty covered . . . :-)

I was happy to learn from the NYT piece that the sale actually meant that Bette Nesmith Graham could reap the fruit of her hard work that was almost wrestled away from her. Sad to hear, though, that she died just six months later of stroke.

An inspirational women and an inspiring story!

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Paper#/media/File:Liqui...

ghaff• 8 years ago

I wonder how many people reading this know what Liquid Paper is before reading the article? :-/

macintux• 8 years ago

I'm old enough to have been in high school when more people took typing class than took one with computers; I'd be surprised if there were more than 20 computers in the entire school.

Wite-Out was a great product, didn't know about Liquid Paper.

sleepybrett• 8 years ago

Her son, Michael Nesmith, was in the Monkees.

mark-r• 8 years ago

Raise your hand if you're old enough to remember either Michael Nesmith or Liquid Paper.

I don't remember where I first heard that bit of trivia, but it sure is interesting.

Bette Nesmith Graham, Who Invented Liquid Paper

Related Stories