Ink History
Do you remember the lines from IA Krylov's fable?
Do you know what gives an oak except acorns? Of course, valuable wood that is hard to rot and very beautiful after processing. The bark, with the help of which the oak skin is used and which is used in medicine as an astringent. And earlier used also tannic nuts-galls - outgrowths on leaves and branches in which the larva of the insect of the walnut tree lives. These nuts are more commonly known as ink.
They squeezed the juice, mixed it with iron vitriol, added a little glue - the ink was obtained, which adhered well to the pen, and the writing they painted acquired a beautiful shine. The surviving manuscripts written by these ink look as if they had just come out from under the pen. True, these inks had one, but rather significant drawback: the written could be read only after 10-12 hours, and before that the text was almost colorless. This naturally hampered the writing process.
In another, more ancient recipe, ink again was not without oak: "Take a little oak bark, yes alder, yes ash, weld them in the water. .. and then throw a piece of iron, pour the soup porridge with milk and a mug of kvass honey".It was these ink written in Russia from the XV century."The forefathers of antiquity" - about the reign of Ivan III, about the final deliverance from the Tatar yoke - all this information came to us precisely because of the durability of these ink from the "weasled".
Silhouette drawing of the end of the XVIII century.
Self-portrait in the office. Engraving A. T. Bolotova, 1789
But the compositions for writing appeared, of course, much earlier - as soon as humanity had a need to write something down, save it for posterity. The first ink was made quite simply: the soot was mixed with something sticky. In Egypt, for this purpose, ashes from burning the roots of papyrus, which was combined with a solution of gum - sticky thick acacia juice, cherries. For a long time, ink was also used in China. Just like the Egyptian ones, they showed good resistance to the action of light. More precisely, it was ink, which had a very significant drawback: over time it became brittle and bounced off the paper on the folds. In addition, the ink was quite thick and flowed off the pen badly, which is why it was preferable in the East to write( or rather draw) hieroglyphics with a brush.
In Europe, ink appeared much later. Archaeologists have found an earthen cup in the ancient Roman city of Herculaneum, which had been covered with ashes, at the bottom of which there was some dark sediment. It turned out that this is the oldest of all known on the ground inkwells! For more than a thousand years, "ink" has dried up in it - ordinary soot, dissolved in oil. And the red ink was considered sacred in those times: only the emperor could write them. It is unlikely that the "divine" Augustus thought that in 2000 years the teachers of the whole world will use red ink, correcting mistakes and presenting scores to schoolchildren. True, Roman ink for this is unlikely to come up - they could be very easy to wash off with a sponge or just slip your tongue.
There were many recipes for ink."Put honey-molasses with a pea-tree, and gold sheets with five or six."All this was thoroughly triturated, and the liquid was obtained, which was written. Then honey gently washed out, and the gold letters remained. So the copyists worked in Russia. Professional Byzantine scribes sometimes also used gold and silver for ink. The parchment was then dyed purple. Widely used ink chestnut( from broth peel of green chestnuts), from ripe elderberry berries and peel of walnuts, even from blueberries - "The decree on ink blueberry" preserved in the manuscript of the XVI century.
But such ink has long been a story. They were replaced by the already mentioned ink from the nut-galls covering the leaves of the oak. In 1855, the Saxon teacher Leongardi made a real revolution in the "ink case".He invented alizarin ink. They were also gallic, but not colorless-cloudy, but intensely blue-green, on paper turning into deep black. The inventor has achieved this with the help of crapp - a product of special processing of the roots of the eastern plant of madder.
Later expensive crapp replaced with synthetic dyes, and ink balls - with tannin or gallic acid. However, soon and this invention has a competitor - aniline ink, for example purple. It is a synthetic dye diluted in water. And with the invention of the fountain pen, other properties were required: they should not destroy plastic or metal parts, should not contain solid particles that can clog the capillary mechanism, should easily drain off the pen, but at the same time do not blot.
When a ballpoint pen appeared, a paste was invented for it, which quickly freezes in the air. And now the ballpoint pens are suggested to be filled with ink again - the ball rotates more easily, which means that the hand is less tired when writing. There was a felt-tip pen. For him, water color inks with special additives are prepared, which provide all the necessary qualities.
There is a proverb: "What is written with a pen, you can not cut out with an ax."To cut down written hardly anyone tried, but it was washed, washed off, displayed very successfully. One of the few reliable recipes of ink offered at one time a well-known Swedish chemist J. Ya. Berzelius. The text written in its ink can only be destroyed with the paper.
But the recipes for invisible( sympathetic) ink are great. Half a century ago they were really used by real and literary spies. Sympathetic ink for different purposes create and now. For example, in Japan, most recently released ink, disappearing from paper in two days. They are needed in order to make temporary notes on the margins of books.
The history of ink stores not only many recipes, but also many mysteries. In the last century, the great inventor Edison invented ink for the blind. It was worth the liquid of a pale gray color to write the text and wait a minute, as the paper in the places where the letters were inscribed, hardened and rose, forming a relief. The inventor was not completely satisfied with his experiments, he wanted to make the letters even more prominent. Whether he managed to create such a composition is unknown.
The recipe of "ink of precious stones" - ruby, sapphire, mother-of-pearl, secret which the monks of the Mongolian monastery of Erdeni-Tzu owned in ancient times remained a mystery. Unknown to the uninitiated and the composition of ink, which continue to be used by the monks, copyists in Buddhist monasteries of Burma, Thailand, Sri Lanka, copy sacred books.
Each time produced its own ink, but the demand for them never passed. And it is no accident: according to Byron, one drop of ink is enough to stir up the thought of millions of people.
Take note of
The ink stain on the fabric can be removed with a cotton swab dipped in a mixture of equal amounts of glycerol and ethyl alcohol. The swab should be changed several times. The cloth is then washed with water.