
Bette Nesmith Graham, Who Invented Liquid Paper - numbsafari
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/11/obituaries/bette-nesmith-graham-liquid-paper.html
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danso
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bette_Nesmith_Graham)

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

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

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wolfhumble
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...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_Paper#/media/File:Liquid_paper_products_Womens_Museum.jpg)

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skookumchuck
It's a great American success story.

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

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ScottBurson
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.

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rgbrenner
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.

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ScottBurson
Ah, thanks. Yes, trichloroethane makes sense.

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pbhjpbhj
Yes, probably one of the first intoxicants of some schoolkids - you'd get your
face down low to concentrate and see where you were applying the stuff (Tippex
in the UK, 1980s) and get a good nose-full.

That ranks along with "banda" toner from fresh duplicates.
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_duplicator](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_duplicator)).

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

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macintux
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.

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sleepybrett
Her son, Michael Nesmith, was in the Monkees.

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mark-r
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.

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legostormtroopr
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.

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Angostura
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.

