Bette Nesmith Graham

Bette Nesmith Graham, mother of Monkees star Michael Nesmith, is the woman inventor credited with discovering one of the most widely used office products of the 20th and 21st centuries.

In the early 1950s, Graham and her fellow secretaries at the Texas Bank and Trust were having difficulty correcting mistakes on the new IBM typewriters. They often had to retype entire pages because of one small error. When Graham observed holiday window painters simply brushing over their mistakes with a fresh coat of paint, she mimicked their technique by using a white, water-based tempera paint to cover her typing errors.

“Liquid Paper” was an instant success. By 1967 its sales exceeded one million units per year, making Graham one of the most financially successful female inventors in history.