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Tasha remembers...I don't remember using white out that much back in the day. Now though, I use it a quite a ... More »
Posted on 03/03/08
Trivia:
Before the days of correction paper, there was correction fluid, or white-out, as a lot of people call it today. Though there is a Wite-Out brand (the well-known line of correction fluid that evolved into a generic term), the very first brand of correction fluid, Liquid Paper, was invented in 1951 by Bette Nesmith-Graham, who, incidentally, is the mother of Michael Nesmith, who was once a member of The Monkees.
Trying to make ends meet as a bank secretary and painting holiday windows for the bank, Nesmith-Graham found that working with early electric typewriters often produced documents with errors that would have to be painstakingly corrected. After putting two-and-two together, she put some white tempera paint in a bottle and used a thin watercolor brush to quickly and easily correct her mistakes. To the chagrin of some of her bosses, co-workers secretly began seeking out her white paint and she continued to use it for five years before she began to market her product. Naming it “Mistake Out” and forming her own company she would eventually rename it Liquid Paper, sell it to Gillette for $47 and a half million and the rest, as they say, was history.
Ten years after the commercial introduction of Liquid Paper, in 1966 George Kloosterhouse, an insurance company clerk, set out to fix something he felt was a problem with the original. Enlisting the help of a friend who was a basement waterproofer and experienced with chemicals, he created his own correction fluid, which he named “Wite-Out.” In 1971, they incorporated as Wite-Out Products, Inc. but it would take another three years to register a patent for Wite-Out.
Early versions of Wite-Out were water-soluble, just as Liquid Paper was, leaving those trying to fix their mistakes wishing they’d never made one in the first place. It felt like it took forever to dry! In 1981, after the company changed hands, a new formula was created with a solvent base and a faster drying time. The downside: an environmentally unfriendly extra bottle of thinner was required leading them to once again reformulate in 1990.
Today, white out can be found in office supply stores and even drugstores and supermarkets! You can get a brush with bristles, or a brush-shaped sponge, perfect for thin applications. If the bottle isn’t your thing, white out is now available in pens, allowing the user to squeeze out just enough to write over the mis-markings. If liquid all together doesn’t do it for you, the marriage of correction fluid and correction paper is here – correction tape is also available in a number of ways, perfect for on-the-fly corrections.
Though it can’t take away the mistakes that were made, white out can certainly make things seem all better. And after all, sometimes that’s all we really need.
