<v Speaker 1>In the early nineteen fifties, in an office in Dallas, Texas,

<v Speaker 1>a young single mom sat at an electric typewriter that

<v Speaker 1>she wasn't very good with, quietly terrified that she was

<v Speaker 1>about to lose the job that was keeping a roof

<v Speaker 1>over her son's head. Before long, she would lose that job,

<v Speaker 1>and the very thing that got her fired would go

<v Speaker 1>on to make her a millionaire, build a company that

<v Speaker 1>she sold for tens of millions of dollars, and put

<v Speaker 1>a small bottle in nearly every office desk in America.

<v Speaker 1>Oh and that little boy who sat at the kitchen

<v Speaker 1>table helping her fill those first bottles by hand, well,

<v Speaker 1>he would grow up to be a rock star for

<v Speaker 1>Haydad Productions. This is anonymous America. Bet Graham was born

<v Speaker 1>in nineteen twenty four in Texas. She was a strong

<v Speaker 1>willed girl who dropped out of high school at seventeen

<v Speaker 1>and went to secretarial school, even though by her own admission,

<v Speaker 1>she didn't really know how to type. She got married

<v Speaker 1>a few years later, and while her husband was away

<v Speaker 1>at war, she gave birth to their son, Michael. When

<v Speaker 1>the marriage ended not long after the war, she found

<v Speaker 1>herself where a great many women found themselves in that

<v Speaker 1>era and had far fewer options to escape. A divorced,

<v Speaker 1>single mother entirely responsible for a child in a world

<v Speaker 1>that just did not make room for her. Bet was

<v Speaker 1>an artist at heart. She loved to paint and draw,

<v Speaker 1>but art doesn't pay a rent check on time. So

<v Speaker 1>she worked her way up through the typing pool and

<v Speaker 1>became an executive secretary at a Dallas bank, earning about

<v Speaker 1>three hundred dollars a month. Her son later remembered that

<v Speaker 1>money worries would often make her burst into tears of panic,

<v Speaker 1>and she had a professional problem on top of a

<v Speaker 1>financial one. The offices were switching to the new electric typewriter,

<v Speaker 1>and their ribbons made a clean correction impossible. One typo

<v Speaker 1>and you were retyping the entire page. For a secretary

<v Speaker 1>who wasn't very good at typing, every mistake was a

<v Speaker 1>complete catastrophe. The solution to that problem came from the

<v Speaker 1>part of Bett that was a painter, not a typist.

<v Speaker 1>She thought about how an artist handles a mistake on

<v Speaker 1>a canvas. A painter doesn't erase, a painter paints over it.

<v Speaker 1>So she mixed up a small batch of white tempair

<v Speaker 1>of paint, tended it to match the bank stationery, and

<v Speaker 1>kept the bottle of it in her desk drawer, and

<v Speaker 1>she started quietly brushing over her errors and typing right

<v Speaker 1>on top of them once they dried. Her boss, she noticed,

<v Speaker 1>never spotted a single correction. The other secretary spotted it, though,

<v Speaker 1>and they wanted a bottle of their own. So she

<v Speaker 1>started mixing larger batches at home. So she started mixing

<v Speaker 1>larger batches at home in her kitchen blender, pouring the

<v Speaker 1>fluid into little bottles and writing a label by hand.

<v Speaker 1>She called it mistake out. She recruited her son Michael

<v Speaker 1>and his friends to sit at the table and fill

<v Speaker 1>the bottles. It was an assembly line of teenagers, and

<v Speaker 1>the orders just kept on coming. She refined the formula,

<v Speaker 1>renamed the product liquid Paper, and in nineteen fifty eight

<v Speaker 1>she applied for a patent and a trademark, and then

<v Speaker 1>the bank fired her. She had grown so absorbed in

<v Speaker 1>the little business run out of her kitchen that her

<v Speaker 1>attention had drifted away from her day job. By one account,

<v Speaker 1>she once absent mindedly signed a piece of bank correspondence

<v Speaker 1>with the name of her own company. Whatever the reason,

<v Speaker 1>she was let go, and getting fired turned out to

<v Speaker 1>be the best thing that could have ever happened, because

<v Speaker 1>now there was nothing to fall back on and nothing

<v Speaker 1>to hold her back. So she poured everything into liquid Paper.

<v Speaker 1>As you know, it grew and it exploded. By nineteen

<v Speaker 1>sixty seven, she was selling more than a million bottles

<v Speaker 1>a year. She built the real headquarters in Dallas, and,

<v Speaker 1>remembering exactly what she had needed as a broke, single mom,

<v Speaker 1>she put a childcare center and a library inside the headquarters,

<v Speaker 1>and she ran the place so that the women who

<v Speaker 1>worked for had a genuine voice and decisions. In nineteen

<v Speaker 1>seventy nine, and failing health, she sold the Liquid Paper

<v Speaker 1>Company to the Gillette Corporation for forty seven point five

<v Speaker 1>million dollars. And here's where the story takes a hard turn.

<v Speaker 1>Just six months after that sale, Bet died of a

<v Speaker 1>stroke at fifty six years old. Her fortune and the

<v Speaker 1>ongoing royalties from every bottle of liquid Paper ever sold,

<v Speaker 1>passed to her son, the boy from the kitchen table

<v Speaker 1>assembly line. His name was Michael Nesmuth, but by then

<v Speaker 1>the entire country knew who he was because he was

<v Speaker 1>a founding member of the Monkeys. He took that inheritance

<v Speaker 1>and those royalties and poured them into a new idea

<v Speaker 1>that he really believed in the music video, helping to

<v Speaker 1>midwife the very art form that would soon become MTV.

<v Speaker 1>So consider what bet actually did. A single mom fired

<v Speaker 1>for being an imperfect typist, took the mistakes she couldn't

<v Speaker 1>stop making and painted them into a fortune. She built

<v Speaker 1>the company that she wished had existed for her, with

<v Speaker 1>a place for the children and a fair shake for

<v Speaker 1>the women. And the money she made covering up other

<v Speaker 1>people's errors helped launch a revolution on television, carried there

<v Speaker 1>by the son one who once filled her bottles by hand.

<v Speaker 1>She spent her entire life trying to help other people

<v Speaker 1>correct their mistakes, and in the end, that was her

<v Speaker 1>greatest invention. That's bet Nessmith Graham, and that's anonymous America.