Wite-Out is a

registered trademark The registered trademark symbol, , is a typographic symbol that provides notice that the preceding word or symbol is a trademark or service mark that has been registered with a national trademark office. A trademark is a symbol, word, or wor ...

for a brand of

correction fluid A correction fluid is an opaque, usually white fluid applied to paper to mask errors in text. Once dried, it can be handwritten or typed upon. It is typically packaged in small bottles, lids attached to brushes (or triangular pieces of foam) th ...

, originally created for use with

photocopies A photocopier (also called copier or copy machine, and formerly Xerox machine, the generic trademark) is a machine that makes copies of documents and other visual images onto paper or plastic film quickly and cheaply. Most modern photocopiers ...

, and manufactured by the BIC corporation.

History

Wite-Out dates to 1966, when Edwin Johan, an

insurance Insurance is a means of protection from financial loss in which, in exchange for a fee, a party agrees to compensate another party in the event of a certain loss, damage, or injury. It is a form of risk management, primarily used to hedge ...

-company clerk, sought to address a problem he observed in

available at the time: a tendency to smudge ink on

photostat The Photostat machine, or Photostat, was an early projection photocopier created in the decade of the 1900s by the Commercial Camera Company, which became the Photostat Corporation. The "Photostat" name, which was originally a trademark of the c ...

ic copies when it was applied. Johan enlisted the help of his associate George Kloosterhouse, a basement waterproofer who experimented with chemicals, and together they developed their own correction fluid, introduced as "Wite-Out WO-1 Erasing Liquid". In 1971, they incorporated as Wite-Out Products, Inc. The trademark "Wite-Out" was registered by the

United States Patent and Trademark Office The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is an agency in the U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark registration authority for the United States. The USPTO's headquarters are in Alex ...

on February 5, 1974. The application listed the date of "first use in commerce" as January 27, 1966. Early forms of Wite-Out sold through 1981 were water-based and hence water-

soluble In chemistry, solubility is the ability of a substance, the solute, to form a solution with another substance, the solvent. Insolubility is the opposite property, the inability of the solute to form such a solution. The extent of the solubi ...

. While this allowed simple cleaning, it also had the problem of long drying times. The formula also did not work well on non-photostatic media such as typewritten copy. The company was bought in 1981 by Archibald Douglas. Douglas, as chairman, led the company toward solvent-based formulas with faster drying times. Three different formulas were created, each optimized for different media. New problems arose: a separate bottle of thinner was required, and the solvent used was known to contribute to

ozone depletion Ozone depletion consists of two related events observed since the late 1970s: a steady lowering of about four percent in the total amount of ozone in Earth's atmosphere, and a much larger springtime decrease in stratospheric ozone (the ozone lay ...

. The company addressed these problems in July 1990 with the introduction of a reformulated "For Everything" correction fluid. The French corporation

Société Bic Société Bic S.A., commonly called Bic and stylized as BiC, is a French manufacturing corporation based in Clichy, Hauts-de-Seine. It sells a world-leading brand of lighters and pens since its founding by Marcel Bich (1914–1994) in 1945, an ...

acquired Wite-Out Products in 1992. In 2017, sales of Wite-Out grew nearly 10 percent globally with ''

AdWeek ''Adweek'' is a weekly American advertising trade publication that was first published in 1979. ''Adweek'' covers creativity, client–agency relationships, global advertising, accounts in review, and new campaigns. During this time, it has cover ...

'' suggesting that the increase in sales was due to artists using the fluid as paint.

References

{{reflist Brands that became generic Correction instruments Products introduced in 1966

History

See also

References