• Ink has varied in composition through the ages.bottle of ink image by Alfonso d'Agostino from Fotolia.com
  
  Without ink, the written word would not have been able to be widely disseminated to influence the educated world. The constitution of ink has varied through time and from culture to culture from those used by ancient Egyptians and Chinese to ink of Medieval scholars and Renaissance men of letters. With the invention of the printing press, inks were developed for printed documents. Modern inks use synthetic materials rather than the natural ingredients of historic inks.
  
  

Ancient Black Inks

• Hebrews used a combination of soot or charcoal mixed with water and sometimes added gum to make the ink used for over 2,000 years in ritual documents. Arabian people made lampblack by burning oil, tar or resin, which was then combined with honey and gum. It was formed into cakes and constituted into ink with water. India ink was invented by the Chinese and was in use by 1200 B.C. It was made by mixing soot from pine smoke and lamp oil with animal gelatin and musk.
  
  

Ancient Brown Ink

• The oldest ink is that derived from the pigment gland of the cuttlefish. The brown-black liquid is used as a defense by the shellfish and released into the water to obscure it from predators. It was used by Hebrews as a sepia tincture, by the Spartans and by the Egyptians. It is the most lasting of natural ingredient inks.
  
  

Colored Inks

• Ancient peoples made colored inks from mineral and plant pigments. Red ink was made of vermilion, which was a combination of mercury, sulfur and potash and cinnabar or native mercuric sulfide. Blue inks were made from indigo, a plant dye, or oxide of copper or of cobalt. Purple was derived from shellfish ordinarily used to dye cloth. Other colored inks were also made and varied from culture to culture, depending on locally available dye plants and mineral compounds.
  
  

Gall Inks

• Beginning about the 12th century and with the advent of paper making, inks made from galls of pine and oak trees came into use. They varied in color from brown to gray to black. Galls are rounded growth on tree branches produced by insects. They were bruised in water and fermented to a paste, which contains tannic acid. When combined with iron and other ingredients, this made a permanent ink. Over time, the iron causes corrosion in the paper substrate. It went out of use in the 19th century when new pigments made it obsolete.
  
  

Printing Inks

• Gutenberg devised an oil-based ink for use with his printing press, and oil-based inks continued to be the mainstay of printing into the 19th century. Recipes for printing inks used in the late 1800s used various combinations of burnt linseed oil, Frankfort black, Prussian blue, lampblack, turpentine, onions and bread.
  
  

Modern Inks

• With the advent of synthetic dyes, inks were changed. Fountain pen inks are complex mixes of water and dyes with other chemicals. Ballpoint pen inks are also complicated proprietary blends of chemicals. The majority of 21st-century inks are used in commercially printed books and periodicals and in printer cartridges for computer peripherals, which are also complex and highly engineered.