Wite-Out is a

registered trademark A trademark (also written trade mark or trade-mark) is a form of intellectual property that consists of a word, phrase, symbol, design, or a combination that identifies a product or service from a particular source and distinguishes it from ot ...

for a brand of

correction fluid Correction fluid can be written on after it has dried. Correction fluid bottle Correction fluid bottle A correction fluid (or correction liquid) is an opaque, usually white fluid applied to paper to mask errors in text. Once dried, it can be ...

, originally created for use with photocopies, and manufactured by the BIC corporation.

History

Wite-Out dates to 1966, when Edwin Johanknecht 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 protect ...

-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 Photocopying, projection photocopier created in the 1900s (decade), decade of the 1900s by the Commercial Camera Company, which became the Photostat Corporation. The "Photostat" name, which was ori ...

ic copies when it was applied. Johanknecht 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 List of federal agencies in the United States, agency in the United States Department of Commerce, U.S. Department of Commerce that serves as the national patent office and trademark ...

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 lowered total amount of ozone in Earth, Earth's upper atmosphere, and a much larger springtime decrease in stratospheric ozone (the ozone layer) around Earth's polar ...

. 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 was founded in 1945 by French aristocrat Marcel Bich and produces specifically disposable items; namely pen ...

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