Claim: Mike Nesmith’s (from the music group, the Monkees) mother was the inventor of Liquid Paper correction fluid.
Status: True.
Origins: Bette Nesmith Graham (she was divorced from Michael’s father in 1946 and remarried in 1964) came up with the idea of using a small bottle of tempera waterbase paint to correct her typing errors while she was an executive secretary with Texas Bank & Trust in Dallas in 1951. She supplied bottles of the liquid to other secretaries at her workplace (under the name “Mistake Out”) for several years; then, in 1956, she improved the formula, changed its name to “Liquid Paper,” and set out to trademark the name and patent her product. After IBM passed on her offer to sell Liquid Paper to them, Bette started marketing the product on her own. Liquid Paper, Inc., did not become profitable for several years, and it was not until the mid-1960s that Liquid Paper correction fluid began to generate substantial income for its investor.
Liquid Paper was sold to the Gillette Corporation in 1979 for $47.5 million (plus a royalty on every bottle sold until the year 2000). Bette Nesmith Graham died in 1980, leaving half her fortune to her son Michael and half to philanthropic organizations.
Claim: The rounded raised lane markers installed on California roads, Botts’ Dots, were named for their inventor.
Status: True.
Origins: They may be “raised pavement markers” in the parlance of the dictionary-keepers, but they are Botts’ Dots to anyone who drives over them. These rounded, raised plastic ceramic or polyester domes that serve to mark off freeway lanes are almost exclusively known by their pleasing-to-the-ear nickname rather than by their more proper (and descriptive) designation.
Botts’ Dots are named for their inventor, Elbert Botts, a chemist who worked for Caltrans (California Department of Transportation) in the 1950s as chief of the highway pavement division. They were designed to enhance painted lines used in designating freeway lanes. Repainting these lines season after season was proving to be both costly and dangerous (the more often Caltrans workers were exposed to vehicles zooming by, the more often there would be a mishap), thus an alternative solution was sought.
Caltrans experimented with better, more reflective paint, but was unable to overcome the substances inherent shortcoming of not being reflected enough in the rain or when a layer of water obscured lane markings after a rainfall. Improved paint wasn’t the solution – it was time to think outside the box.
Botts began to tinker with rounded lane makers, his work culminating in 1955 in the invention of what would become a ubiquitous part of California highways, the Botts’ Dot. Use of the embedded raised domes resulted in a reflective lane separation that was visible day and night, rain or dry. Its inventor always said inventing the dots was the easy part – much more challenging was coming up with the glue to hold them in place year after year. (At first, Botts favored attaching the dots to the roadway with steel spikes but soon realized a spike that shed its dot would become a hazard lying in wait of a plump, unsuspecting tire.)
The glue was perfected in the early 1960s, but the first Botts’ Dots weren’t installed until 1966 on Interstate 80 around Fairfield and on Highway 99 near Fresno. Elbert Botts did not live to see his brainchild make his name a household word – he died in 1962 long before any fame was associated with him.
A persistent bit of lure attaches to Botts, that he sold his idea to Caltrans and became a wealthy man by wisely insisting on payment of a small royalty per dot installed. This is untrue: Botts was the head of the Caltrans department charged with devising solutions to the problem of marking its freeway lanes. This was not one inventor slaving away in a basement laboratory to devise a killer app in order to sell it to a company in desperate need of it, to suddenly find himself living in the lap of luxury as the royalty checks kept rolling in. Rather, this was a man who worked a 9-to-5 job at Caltrans battling all manner of problems associated with pavement and lane markings.
Botts’ Dots come in two types, round and square, and in several colors. Most are white, center markers and amber, wrong-way markers are red, and fire hydrant markers are blue. On most of California's multi-lane freeways, Caltrans uses four white non-reflective dots in a row, interspersed every 48 feet with a reflective square, along with painted stripes dividing lanes.
In 1997, there were some 25 million Botts’ Dots in California. They can last more than 10 years on some stretches of roadway but in others have to be replaced after only a few months’ wear.
Botts’ Dots provide an additional benefit unforeseen by its inventor – driving over them produces a ka-thump! Ka-thump! Ka-thump! sound that swiftly captures the attention of motorists drifting out of their lanes or off the highway. Because of this, they are installed on the outer edges of roadways known for their incidences of highway hypnosis, as well as on the lines dividing one lane from another. Many sleepy or distracted motorists have been saved form disaster by the alerting ka-thumps! of a sequence of Botts’ Dots under their wheels.
