Ink | Writing & Printing History, Uses & Types (2024)

ink, fluid or paste of various colours, but usually black or dark blue, used for writing and printing. It is composed of a pigment or dye dissolved or dispersed in a liquid called the vehicle.

Writing inks date from about 2500 bc and were used in ancient Egypt and China. They consisted of lampblack ground with a solution of glue or gums, molded into sticks, and allowed to dry. Before use, the sticks were mixed with water. Various coloured juices, extracts, and suspensions of substances from plants, animals, and minerals also have been used as inks, including alizarin, indigo, pokeberries, cochineal, and sepia. For many centuries, a mixture of a soluble iron salt with an extract of tannin was used as a writing ink and is the basis of modern blue-black inks. The modern inks usually contain ferrous sulfate as the iron salt with a small amount of mineral organic acid. The resulting solution is light bluish black and, if used alone on paper, appears only faintly. After standing it becomes darker and insoluble in water, which gives it a permanent quality. To make the writing darker and more legible at the outset, dyes are added. Modern coloured inks and washable inks contain soluble synthetic dyes as the sole colouring matter. The writing fades in strong light and rinses out of washable fabrics but lasts for many years if not subjected to such effects.

India ink is a dispersion of carbon black in water; the suspension is stabilized with various substances, including shellac in borax solution, soap, gelatin, glue, gum arabic, and dextrin. It is used mainly for drawing.

Modern printing inks are usually less fluid than writing inks. The composition, viscosity, density, volatility, and diffusibility of ink are variable.

The Chinese experimented with printing at least as early as ad 500, with inks from plant substances mixed with coloured earths and soot or lampblack. When Johannes Gutenberg invented printing with movable type in Germany in about 1440, inks were made by mixing varnish or boiled linseed oil with lampblack. For more than 300 years such inks continued to be used with little modification in their composition.

In 1772 the first patent was issued in England for making coloured inks, and in the 19th century chemical drying agents appeared, making possible the use of a wide variety of pigments for coloured inks. Later, varnishes of varying stiffness were developed to make inks for different papers and presses. Varnish was replaced by mineral oil in inks when high-speed newspaper presses were introduced. The oil base penetrated rapidly into newsprint and dried quickly. Water-based inks are also used, especially for screen printing. It was not until the beginning of the 20th century that ink-making became a complicated chemical-industrial process.

The manufacture of modern inks takes into account the surface to be imprinted, the printing process, and special requirements for the job, such as colour, opacity, transparency, brilliance, lightfastness, surface hardness, pliability, wettability, purity, and odourlessness. Inks for low-speed letterpress printing—the process usually used in book production—are compounded of carbon black, a heavy varnish, and a drier to reduce the drying time. Many other vehicles, pigments, and modifiers may be used. Intaglio inks are composed of petroleum naphthas, resins, and coal-tar solvents. The intaglio printing process is used chiefly in printing rotogravure newspaper supplements and cartons, labels, and wrappers. Plastic materials are usually printed with aniline inks, which contain methyl alcohol, synthetic resins, and shellac.