Steve Poweska, aged 9, of Rochester, N, Y., for his question:
What is India ink made of?
India ink is the blackest ink in the world. It also lasts longer than any other ink. The scribes of Egypt used a sort of India ink 4,000 years ago. They wrote on a paper called papyrus. Papyrus is a reedy plant that grows near the river Nile. Its folded leaves were used to make this papyrus‑.paper. The ancient writings of ink on papyrus are still clear and readable. The sturdy black ink was made of soot, glue and water.
Some people call India ink China ink. For it first came to Europe from China and Japan. It was shipped in solid sticks and cakes. This solid form was mixed with liquids to make writing ink.
Nowadays we make our own India ink here 1 n America. We still use the ingredients used by the scribes of old Egypt. But we have improved on the recipe. Our India ink is easier to handle. It is gust as black as we can make It waterproof.
The color, or pigment, used is still carbon black. You can gather this sooty stuff for yourself. You need a slab of cold porcelain. You also need a yellow, smokey gas flame. Let the porcelain slab touch the gab flame. A smokey soot will collect on it. This black dust is carbon black.
To make India ink, this fine black dust is mixed with a liquid. The liquid will contain water, a little glue and a little soap. This mixture makes a fine, black drawing ink. But there is a way to make it even more serviceable.
It can be made waterproof. When your India ink drawing is dry, you can spill water on it and no harm is done. It runs right off without blurring the lines and letters. The waterproofing recipe calls for a small amount of shellac„ A mixture of shellac, ammonia and borax is added to the first recipe.
If India ink is so wonderful, why don't we use it to do all of our writing? The fact is, it has a few bad habits. The fine carbon dust in the liquid tends to clog. You know this if you have ever left the stopper off the black bottle, It also tends to rot pen points,
Always wash your pen clean in water when you have finished working with India ink, and, of course, put the stopper on the bottle tight.
Such a sticky, clogging ink could never be used in fountain pens. They need free‑flowing inks. These are fine inks and last a long time. They also come in handsome colors, but good old India ink is still the blackest and the longest lasting ink there is. We can forgive it for being a little hard to handle.