The Secrets Behind Ink In The 18th Century - Historical Writing Series Part 2

we're here again today with brian allison and we're gonna be talking about it but before we talk about that where are we at right now we're at historic monster station in Goodlettsville Tennessee in the Bowen Campbell house an amazing sight here in the middle of Tennessee if you're ever in this area check it out but we're talking about ink today inks from the 18th 19th century we got a few examples here tell us about ink well ink is a pretty complicated subject and it's one that if you're going to be writing with quill pens it's it's as important as the pen not all inks are made the same not all pens are made the same you've got to find the right but any combination of the two now we've got several varieties that you can go with modern calligraphy ink there's absolutely no reason not to it's sold in the stores you know art stores you sell it as well there's packaged India ink but it's calligraphy ink and it's good for use with quill pens what you want to avoid is anything that's like an acrylic ink or those artist inks those tend to clog your quill pen that's because they dry up and they kind of paint the pen right in fact they they would use acrylic ink excuse me a India ink back in the old days and they'd use it with quill pens but you better be prepared to cut a new need every time because they knew it was going to dry and harden so bad shellac didn't had shellac as a binder so that's gonna be rough on the quill pen it was a long time before they came up with a proper ink for writing in the Middle Ages the most popular ink was carbon ink or made with lampblack right so there are powdered ink that's on lamp Blackey it just have lamp black and a binder gum arabic pretty much that's it and you can make that with distilled water distilled because that cuts down on the mold growth and what-have-you and then that is good to go that's been used from the Middle Ages as an artist saying because of writing ink all the way up to the present day and that's very good for people who are on the go who like traveling in the wilderness someone or cat don't have a lot of supplies and just bring along a few packets of ink you can but except yeah but it's got problems so it does kazuma basically it's a you've got to dump out what you can't use at the end of the day and the other problem is if it rains you can kiss your writing goodbye because it's not waterproof so it took them a long time to come up with the ideal waterproof ink or what they consider by their waterproof ink and they finally hit on the magic solution which was and involved these little things right here so they looked like I don't know miss shapen a corner or a dried-up sherry I there were pretty little things no that but these are very valuable and were used at the time for making ink they're called oak galls or oak apples some people call them and they're made by the gall wasp the gall wasp berries burrows into the tree to breed and this is how the oak tree of response response defends it so you may have some of these in your oak trees around your house because they're in the United States or your um they're everywhere these are imported from Syria and even at the time the best of the the oak galls that were available were called Aleppo galls because they came from that little town in Syria but this is almost pure tannic acid when it comes off the tree and so they figured out a little bit of science experiment you take this and a couple of other ingredients and you can come up with an amazing waterproof ink that'll last for a long long time so the pigment inks will sit on top of the surface but that means when water gets underneath it or we can wash the writing rod or the page whereas this actually h's the paper it causes in fact one of the big headaches for conservators these days iron gall ink was the universal ink pretty much from say about the fifteenth century all the way up to the end of the 19th and when we go back 12th century probably all the way up to the 19th and these it's great it you can't wash it off the page because it's actually burning into the fibers of the paper and so today after three or four hundred years some of that writing is actually burned through the paper now you can hold it up and exactly as always how do you actually see burns in the shape of the writing which means it eventually destroyed the paper now that wasn't the problem for them because they didn't think the wet reading would last that long anyway today it's a real headache to try to kill the acidity before it actually destroys the document so a lot of your favorite documents like the Declaration of Independence or towards Washington's papers cure conservators have to go to great lengths to try to neutralize that acidity before it destroys that document forever so we've got the ox bone which is tannic acid what's the other component now the next one is what they called green tree all or Copperas and that's this little green crystal powder that you can get today it's actually sold as a fertilizer at garden shops you can get it from pigment stores online they made their own so but this is iron it's iron sulfate iron so iron ii sulfate they have a new code where you put the number ID so you want to sulfate so they call it compress but only probably because it was kind of a green color yeah there are is copper sulfate it's very blue green it's not the same thing no coppers by the way we're not talking a time of scientific rigidity so coppers could mean either iron sulfate or copper sulfate okay but they called it that because it was greenish blue and it had that tint to it so but you want ironed to sulfate for this because this is actually called Ferro Golic ink sometimes or iron gall ink and that's the combination of these two substances it's pure simple science crush tannic acid mixed with iron ii sulfate and you end up with this blue-black ink almost instantly and they would ground grind this into a powder and mortar and pestle they would grind that into a powder what you've got some versions here i do have those right here when you see them there's very little difference between the two you've got on this side is the iron teeth sulphate that's the crystals right here this is the blue-green crystals here and on the other side this is the oak galls crushed up and moved into solution here now we're gonna try this i don't know what's going to happen next but let's live dangerously job and there you go that that is an amazing process to watch it's fun now there just is so this isn't everything of this ink it still needs right you could use this as ink but it's not gonna work very well until you add gum arabic the third ingredient is always a binder gum arabic is a naturally occurring substance oh yeah you can get it out of it's actually food safe it's used in chewing gum and things like that but what it is is it's sticky and it'll make that ink bind and thicker and that's one of the keys to any of these inks that you can do if you need to thin them add a little bit of distilled water if you need to thicken them add a little bit of gum arabic and these were these two substances will keep you keep your ink to the right consistency which is very important when you're using quill pen so you mentioned gum arabic has a binder honey honey is actually period-accurate that goes back to the Middle Ages that was used with with carbon ink before they invented iron gall ink so that's been used as a binder for years egg white has been used as other substances I would recommend use the experiment with some of the more arcane ones because it takes some you know some getting used to you and the proportions right but basically a gum arabic is easily available in art stores and it makes it but honey or other things are gonna go bad yes and that's one thing also keep in mind if you use water in this it will go bad eventually to go mouldy little ascorbic acid vitamin C will keep that from happening or alcohol my iron gall ink that I make at home I use red wine and I've had very little mold growth over the years but if you use just water like they did it eventually will go moldy so this isn't the only type of ink there are other colors no black was the most formal and that was the most used but there's other colors available as well blue was especially popular not usually for correspondence but for marking things for for arts and that sort of thing and that's usually a concoction dyed with indigo in those days then they also had red ink and red ink was usually made with log wood in those days which is a little hard to come by today yeah but it's uh it was a very important thing every almost everybody had an office would have red ink around because it was used for business forms it was used to mark and underline important sections of legal documents that sort of thing in fact there's a term that we have that goes all the way back to the Middle Ages when the Catholic Church the monks used to record the calendar for the year and they would put the important feast days in red ink which gives us the modern term a red letter day and that all comes from the use of that red ink so that was incredibly important for business and legal military sort of things as well and now one other thing about iron gall ink if you're going to try that and do that experiment at home or you know do safety precautions you don't want to you know wash your hands before you even the most doesn't yes acid yeah it is a strong acid and you don't want to get it on your skin everything it turns my fingers purple every time I do it and you know obviously there's a little bit of toxicity so you want to make sure you be safe there the other thing to be to remember on this is this stuff is acidic which means if you're going to use it you want to contain it in a nonreactive container which means glass or ceramic that sort of thing it will pit and corrode most metals which means don't use it in a pewter or a brass inkwell or without a ceramic liner and if you're going to use metal pen nibs with it I wouldn't recommend it especially with a vintage nib it will destroy it eventually but if you use even modern nibs the best way to cut down on it is dip it in water every time you use it after you're done dipping the water wipe it off clearly because this stuff will eventually corrode and destroy your pen nib there's nothing you can do about that thank you Brian fascinating topic lots to learn here chemistry and all this just kind of history all built into something as simple as ink so really really fun i if you want more information especially like how to make a quill pen make sure to check out this episode and stay tuned we'll be covering more of these similar topics paper other things like writing make sure to stay tuned thanks for watching

Channel: Townsends

Views: 279,073

Keywords: townsends, jas townsend and son, reenacting, history, 18th century, 19th century, jon townsend, 18th century cooking, how to, colonial cooking, the secret history of the british garden, washing clothes, historical cooking, laundry soap, history documentary, hair tutorial, marie antoinette, 18 century cooking, writing, ink, pen, guill pen, writing with ink

Id: P582srfq_14

Length: 9min 55sec (595 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 22 2019