[HN Gopher] Bette Graham, inventor and founder of Liquid Paper
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Bette Graham, inventor and founder of Liquid Paper
Author : paulpauper
Score : 50 points
Date : 2021-05-16 17:26 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thehustle.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (thehustle.co)
| dang wrote:
| Past related threads:
|
| _Bette Graham, the inventor and founder of Liquid Paper (2019)_
| - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22533312 - March 2020 (13
| comments, pretty bad)
|
| _Bette Nesmith Graham, Who Invented Liquid Paper_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17513500 - July 2018 (16
| comments, better)
| swayvil wrote:
| The subtext being : "So very impressive. And she was a woman!"
|
| Is this patronizing?
|
| We see it a lot. Racially and genderly. You know what I mean.
|
| If I was the subject of this kind of focus I might wince a bit. I
| wince a bit anyway.
| sesteel wrote:
| I don't interpret it the same as you. I know this is probably
| obvious, women faced and continue to face different challenges
| in the workplace and in business than men do. I feel the writer
| is simply attempting to acknowledge that fact.
|
| More cringe-worthy, in my opinion, is the trend for people to
| attempt to create victims of others. Not everything is an
| attack or laced with some subtext begging for analysis and
| blame to be attributed. But, that is just me.
| [deleted]
| empressplay wrote:
| People in underrepresented groups benefit from being made aware
| of successful people from those groups. It shows them that the
| lack of representation is not the result of some inherent lack
| of ability, but rather other social factors, such as
| institutionalized bias, which is still discouraging, but not as
| much as feeling incapable.
| tgv wrote:
| I know what you mean. The forced positivity of "you will never
| believe what this <insert underrepresented group of the month>
| did!". However, when there's a story behind it, I don't mind.
| It's fine to show that people can achieve something noteworthy
| from a disadvantaged position. And in this case, it's
| interesting enough. I've used "liquid paper", or Typex as its
| successor was called here. Not an earth shattering invention,
| but a clever one, that has saved many people a lot of time,
| although at the expense of the swearing vocabulary. And
| apparently the inventor also had business sense. Not the most
| frequent combination.
| neilv wrote:
| It's a story of someone less-known, yet who invented an iconic
| product of an era, despite ordinary circumstances, built a
| business around it, and even survived aggressive business moves
| by more traditional actors.
|
| Part of the ordinary circumstances -- but not the only
| achievement -- were due to being a woman in that time and
| place, when business mostly saw women as doing only certain
| kinds of jobs, and reserved much of the more prestigious jobs
| for men. (Sounds worse than today, but there's obviously still
| biases and inertia.)
|
| Here's another point of this story: it seems it was _because_
| of the diversity of experience that she brought to the problem
| &solution space (i.e., working as a secretary at the time,
| understanding the costs and difficulties there, having also
| worked in painting) that she was able to invent this, and then
| to bootstrap a business from zero.
|
| Whether or not you want to look at the part about her being a
| woman then (which I think makes the story more interesting), it
| still seems an interesting story, maybe inspiring, and maybe
| causes us to reflect on all sorts of changes since then.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads on generic tangents and especially
| not with flamebait material. It leads to much less interesting,
| and usually nastier, discussion.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
| DoreenMichele wrote:
| This is fantastic. She got rich because she typed so bad she
| desperately needed a solution for all her typos.
|
| Also, the part about benefits for her employees: Aflac was big on
| stuff like that.
|
| My first week, the last still living founder, Paul Amos, said to
| me something like "If the company takes care of you, you will
| take care of it."
|
| People who don't do right by their employees are often just
| shooting themselves in the foot and haven't yet realized it.
| ghaff wrote:
| I wonder how many people here reading the title even know what
| Liquid Paper is.
| deep-root wrote:
| Hasn't it been ubiquitous worldwide for ~50 years, even amongst
| today's primary/grade schoolers?
|
| I recall reading a recent article around paper sales being down
| but liquid paper sales remaining unusually strong. Wish I could
| find it.
|
| Edit: Found the article in question
| https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/03/who-s...
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'm guessing the GP was commenting on the fact that very few
| people use type writers any more, and much less if people had
| hear of Liquid Paper
| detaro wrote:
| Internationally I'd guess not under that brand name (never
| heard of it)? And at least here in Germany, in school in the
| 90s/00s we almost exclusively used ink eraser pens, not the
| equivalents to Liquid Paper - but then again those parts of
| Europe are probably unusual internationally by sticking so
| much to fountain pens in school.
| 123123as1asd12 wrote:
| In Australia we use white out :)
| azornathogron wrote:
| Never heard of it growing up in the UK. We used Tipp-Ex,
| which Wikipedia says is a German brand. Not sure if it's the
| same formula or just similar.
| ghaff wrote:
| I don't know. I haven't used it since maybe the late 1970s
| when I last used typewriters regularly. Maybe my secretaries
| used it for a bit longer.
| neilv wrote:
| There was a long overlap, when the same office might be
| using both computers and typewriters.
|
| For example, not all internal processes might be on the
| computer. Or external processes often still used paper
| forms, especially externally. A typewriter was also handy
| for shipping/courier forms, and for addressing envelopes.
| (When I was doing shipments for a small computer products
| wholesaler, UPS _still_ had us record shipments as line
| items in carbon-forms book, and tear off the top sheet or
| more to hand to the driver when they came to pick up the
| boxes for the day.)
|
| Somewhere in there, the IBM Selectric II Correcting
| typewriter came out, which I imagine took some Liquid Paper
| sales. I had a chance to use one of these, after using
| computers for years, and they were still a blast. The
| "mechanical keyboards" meme has nothing on the visceral,
| powerful typing experience of a Selectric II. (I fully
| intend to get at least one, in excellent condition, once
| I'm out of student/startup-apartment mode.)
| analog31 wrote:
| Wow, it's hard to say which is cooler: Being in the Monkees, or
| having the inventor of Liquid Paper as your mom.
| babesh wrote:
| Awesome story of ingenuity.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Necessity is the mother of invention
| [deleted]
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