Good for Video Music, Not So Good for Typewriters

Mike Nesmith with an electric typewriter, Chicago, January 18, 1983.

The son of the woman who invented the “Curse of Typewriter Collectors” has died of heart failure at his home in Carmel Valley, California, at the age of 78. He was Robert Michael Nesmith, apparently once well known - as Mike Nesmith - in popular music as a member of a group called The Monkees. Even without his music career, he would have died a very rich man.

Mike's mother was Bette Clair Graham (née McMurray), above, who in 1954 invented Liquid Paper. Liquid Paper was used to paint over typing mistakes, allowing the typist to type the correct word or name over the white paint. Liquid Paper contains titanium dioxide, also used as a pigment in paint.

Bette and Mike in 1957

Bette (1924-80) was said to have relieved typists of “the pressure of perfection”, but she is the scourge of people like me who seek perfection in manual typewriters.

Typists usually continued typing before the paint had properly dried, so that traces of Liquid Paper were frequently painted on to typewriter platen feed rollers, the platen itself, and the card holders either side of the printing point. When repairing or restoring typewriters, the paint marks are quite hard to remove, especially from the card holders and the feed rollers. Correction paper, used as an alternative to Liquid Paper, left many hundreds of tiny white flecks in the workings of the typewriter, including in the typebasket segment, impairing the machine’s operation.

Bette in 1978

Bette was a single mother, five years divorced from Michael’s father Warren, when in 1951 she was promoted to executive secretary to the chairman of the Texas Bank & Trust in Dallas on $300 a month. Her first bottles of what she originally called Mistake Out were of a concoction using tempera, mixed in her kitchen blender and poured into nail polish containers. In 1958 she tried to patent the fluid, but the cost of $400 was beyond her. But she went ahead and formed a company to market her mix, having secured royalties for it. For a dollar an hour, her son Mike and his friends helped fill bottles in the family garage. By 1975 the company was producing 25 million bottles a year, with factories in Toronto and Brussels. Bette sold the company to Gillette for $47.5 million in 1979. She died on May 12, 1980, of complications of a stroke, leaving half her fortune of more than $50 million to Mike and the rest to charity.