Bette Nesmith Graham (March 23, 1924 – May 12, 1980) was an American typist, commercial artist, and the inventor of the correction fluid Liquid Paper.

[2] After Warren returned from serving in World War II, the couple divorced, leaving Bette to raise Michael as a single mother.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

[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.