The first name of the fluid later sold as Liquid Paper.
Mistake Out and Tipp-Ex
“How did you fix a typing mistake on a typewriter?”
On a typewriter, a mistake meant retyping the whole page, or scrubbing at it with an eraser and hoping.
In the early 1950s Bette Nesmith, a single mother working as a secretary at a bank in Dallas, had an idea borrowed from painting: cover the mistake with paint that matched the paper, and type over it. She mixed a white water-based paint in her kitchen and carried it to work in a small bottle with a fine brush. Other secretaries began asking for some.
In 1956 she began selling it as Mistake Out. Her teenage son and his friends filled the bottles. She later renamed the product Liquid Paper, and built it into a large business. In 1979 she sold the company to Gillette for $47.5 million.
Her son was Michael Nesmith, who became famous as a member of the 1960s pop group the Monkees.
In Germany, Wolfgang Dabisch of Eltville took another route. In 1958 he filed a patent for correction paper: small slips coated with white powder. You backspaced, put the slip between the ribbon and the page, and typed the wrong letter again, which covered it in white. The company that sold it was named Tipp-Ex, from the German tippen, to type, and the Latin ex, out. Tipp-Ex added a correction fluid in 1965.
Look closer: In Britain, “Tipp-Ex” became a verb. Like Hoover, a brand name turned into an everyday word.