HISTORY OF INK

History of Ink

History of Ink

Introduction

The oldest recipe for ink belongs to Egyptians - a mixture of soot and oil for writing on papyrus. The same composition was used in China two thousand years ago. In Greece and Rome, various different types of inks were used. From purple and red cinnabar they made "the court Ink”. Black ink is made of black paint for painting, the soot from the fruit seeds, vine charcoal bone charcoal. A century later the ink made from the bark decoction tanning plants. (Ainsworth, 2007)

In the sixteenth century Chinese invented the famous still of iron ink. They used it for the manufacture of alder roots, walnut or oak bark, ink-nuts "(abnormal growths on the leaves of various plants), this was cooked and plunged into the pieces of iron. To harden the ink was added gum (cherry glue), and to reduce the viscosity - alum, ginger and cloves. The secret to getting the ink was understood by the chemist KB Scheele in 1876. He found that when cooking from alder bark in the water coming tannic acid, which gives the ferrous iron, ferric salt. The solution was slightly colored, but when dry iron oxidizes and darkens which was the ultimate formula to manufacture ink. Since it was invented long ago, many recipes for ink have been introduced since than, including the "eternal and invisible type of ink. (Martin, 2009)

Discussion

The ancient Chinese (400 BC) knew the use of black ink with which they wrote with pens or brushes and consisted of carbon black and rubber. The emperors and kings wrote with an ink pen. Only they had the right to use the ink which was made ??with the blood of the murex, a genus of gastropod mollusk that produced the purple. Also some books were written in letters ...